
Class _J£JLsa 
Book ±_j_u£l 



(fopyrigM . 



^o4- 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Social Law 
In the Spiritual World 



Other Books by the Same Author 



EH and Sybil Jones : Their Life and Work 
12mo, 300 pages. (1889.) 

Practical Christianity 

12mo, 206 pages. (1899.) 

A Dynamic Faith 

12mo, 105 pages. (1901.) 

A Boy's Religion from Memory 

16mo, 145 pages. (1902.) 

George Fox; An Autobiography 

12mo, 2 vols., 584 pages. Illustrated. 
(1903.) 



SOCIAL LAW IN THE 
SPIRITUAL WORLD 



Studies in 
Human and Divine Inter-Relationship 



BY 

RUFUS M. JONES, A. M., Litt.D, 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HAVERFORD COLLEGE 



THE JOHN C. WINSTON CO. 

PHILADELPHIA 
CHICAGO TORONTO 






I LIBRARY Of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 3 1904 

>} Copyright Entry / 






A 



Copyright 1904, by 
The John C. Winston Co. 



To 

3obn Milbelm TRowntree 

DEAR FRIEND OVER THE SEA 

With whom I have had a new revelation of the 
riches of human fellowship and the still 
deeper joy of fellowship with our 
Divine Companion, these 
pages are affection- 
ately dedicated. 



Introduction 



" Jesus saith : let not him who seeks . . . cease until he finds, and 
when he finds he shall wonder, and wondering, he shall reach the 
kingdom, and, having reached the kingdom, he shall rest." 

"A Saying " of Jesus. 

" Quailing at the mighty range 
Of secret truths which yearn for birth, I haste 
To contemplate undazzled some one truth, 
Its bearings and effects alone — at once, 
What was a speck expands into a star, 
Asking a life to pass exploring thus, 
Till I near craze. I go to prove my soul! 
I see my way as birds their trackless way. 
I shall arrive ! What time, what circuit first, 
I ask not : but unless God send his hail 
Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, 
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: 
He guides me and the bird. In his good time I " 

Browning's '"Paracelsus," Book I. 



Introduction 

Those of us who have passed the middle 
point "in the pathway of this our life," vividly 
remember how twenty years ago Drummond 
opened a new world to us. It is easy enough 
now to find defects and limitations in his 
"Natural Law in the Spiritual World." But 
it came at a psychological moment, and it 
did its work perhaps even more effectively than 
a better book, that is to say, an exacter one, 
would have done. Just coming to the end of 
our college course, we were hanging then mid-air 
between a Christianity and a science which 
would not "come together." It seemed that 
we must give up one or the other. 

There are few crises to compare with that 
which appears when the simple, childhood 
religion, imbibed at mother's knee and absorbed 
from early home and church environment, 



io Social Law in the Spiritual World 

comes into collision with a scientific, solidly 
reasoned system which explains the universe, 
with all its manifold detail, by natural law, 
and leaves no place in the scheme for the 
objects of early faith, or for anything which 
commands worship. At this crisis Drummond 
found us and " spoke to our condition." We 
paid little heed to the defects of his argument. 
We found at a leap that the two worlds could 
go together, that science and religion were not 
two discordant languages, bringing irreconcilable 
accounts of the nature of things, and that all 
that we had learned or could learn by studying 
nature only added to the riches of the knowledge 
of the glory of God. 

We saw that the newer message of science 
illuminated the older message of salvation, and 
that the laws of life, discovered in micro-organ- 
isms, ran up to the very top of the scale, and 
appeared again in the highest facts of the 
spiritual life. "The Natural Law in the 
Spiritual World ' ' was quickly superseded, but it 
had done its work. It was like the drop which 
the chemist pours into a saturate solution and 
which instantly produces a precipitate. Before 



Introduction ii 

the critics had time to attack it, its main thesis 
was fastened forever in the thought of hosts of 
young men. It quickly became a truism, and 
one found himself unconsciously making all his 
discoveries in nature minister to the needs of 
the soul. 

When Drummond wrote his book, the pre- 
vailing problems were biological — we were asking 
how we could get our Christian doctrines of sin 
and salvation to fit into a system of evolution. 
That problem no longer exists for most thought- 
ful persons. The Galilean has conquered again, 
has again led captivity captive. Christianity 
has come out of the struggles of the nineteenth 
century with larger gains than in any other epoch 
since the Renaissance, though, as always hap- 
pens in spiritual victories, the conquerors are 
also conquered. Christianity has itself been 
deeply transformed during the period of its 
recent conquests, perhaps as profoundly as it was 
transformed in the sixteenth century. 

During these twenty years, since Drummond 's 
book appeared, the problem has shifted. The 
Christian minister to-day is not anxiously read- 
ing books on biology. The stress lies elsewhere. 



1 2 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

He is keenly watching the progress of psychology. 
He is beginning to discover that every one of his 
precious articles of faith must finally submit to 
a psychological test. He has weathered geology 
and biology ; can he peradventure bring his ship 
past this new headland? 

It takes little reflection to discover that every- 
thing which has been revealed or known, every 
intimation or utterance, has come through some- 
body's consciousness. Truth is never found 
lying ready-made, done up in packages. It is 
not written for us in mystic letters across the 
sky. It rises out of somebody's consciousness 
and gets uttered through somebody's lips. That 
means that in the last resort we must thoroughly 
investigate consciousness: Has it any laws? 
Can we find through it any criterion of reality? 
Does it give us any basis of right and wrong, of 
truth and error? Does our private conscious- 
ness spring out of a deeper consciousness? Is 
mind, or soul, anything more than a comforting 
word, and does not the entire inner life finally 
reduce to brain vibration, set going by ether 
vibrations ? Or at best, is not the individual mind 
the creator of its own world and of its own beliefs ? 



Introduction 13 

There is no religious view or practice so sacred 
that it does not sooner or later find itself 
summoned into the sanctum of the psycholo- 
gist, where it is calmly asked by what right it 
continues to survive, and to hold a place in 
the lives of mankind. Does one wish to know 
the ground of faith in immortality? He does 
not weigh Plato's argument from mathematics. 
He pays little or no attention to any book a 
quarter of a century old. He is eager to see 
what the latest psychology has to say. He dis- 
covers that he must first find out what it means 
to be a person, what the inherent nature of 
personality really is, whether body is ultimate, 
or whether the self is a deeper ultimate. 

So with every other article of faith, or hope. 
Some insistent questioner is sure to ask, Does it 
square with the facts of consciousness? We 
have slowly pushed back from one breastwork 
about the citadel to another, until we have come 
at last to the citadel itself. When the authority 
of the Church was questioned, the defenders of 
the faith fell back on the authority of Scripture. 
When the Scriptures themselves were put in the 
crucible, the enlightened defenders of the faith 



14 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

calmly said, "the basis of religion, the seat of 
truth and authority is in the soul itself. Shake 
everything visible, and still the citadel of the 
faith will remain among the things which cannot 
be shaken. " But psychology does not spare the 
citadel itself. It asks all sorts of ultimate ques- 
tions about this inward "seat of truth and 
authority ' ' — the soul itself. 

It is manifestly impossible to crowd our 
religious dogmas and our sacred traditions into 
some compartment impervious to thought or to 
have them unaffected by the present day studies 
on the nature of the inner life.* It cannot be 
done simply because religion is forever bound up 
with the inner life. It is not something outside 
the self — to be put on or to be put off — it is an 
attitude and aspect of this very inner life of 
man. So that every conclusion which psy- 
chology settles has its bearing on religion. 

The first effect of applying psychological an- 
alysis to these most precious possessions of the 
race was, as has been the case with all the rising 
sciences, a strong wave of scepticism. The 

*As Lowell said, a generation ago: "Nothing that keeps 
thought out is safe from thought." 



Introduction 15 

earlier conclusions made for materialism — a 
materialism which left scant place for spiritual 
values and almost no ground for an endless life 
beyond physical death. It looked as though 
automaton views of life were to be fastened upon 
us with irresistible logic, and as though religion 
would be relegated to the dust-heap of dead 
superstitions. 

These dangers are well passed for most men. 
The cure for scepticism is always deeper knowl- 
edge, and the years have brought it. Now the 
great task is restatement and reinterpretation in 
terms of the wider truth which has come to us — 
a task which is being splendidly accomplished 
by writers who combine exact scholarship with 
the rarer gift of prophetic insight. The trouble 
with many of the best works on these themes is 
that they are too learned and technical to help 
the wayfaring man who wants to get the newer 
insight and who yet cannot find any way to get 
into the onward moving current. This present 
book is an attempt to help such persons. It 
avoids technical terms as much as possible, and 
it is written in popular rather than in scientific 
style. It consists of a series of studies on the 



1 6 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

nature and meaning of personal life, with special 
emphasis upon their religious implication. As 
its title implies, it aims to show through psy- 
chology, as Drummond showed through biology, 
that life can be unified from top to bottom,that 
the laws and principles which our inner life 
reveals enable us to discover also the nature and 
spirit of the infinite Person with whom our finite 
lives are bound up. 

The most fruitful outcome of the study of 
inner, personal life has been the revelation of 
inherent relationship. Early psychology was 
individualistic. The individual was treated as 
though he could be absolutely insulated from all 
other lives and from the outside world and 
studied as a discrete entity. Still worse, his 
inner life was cut up into little independent 
" faculties," which, too, were studied as though 
they existed in isolation. This is a dead con- 
ception. There are no independent "faculties." 
Perception, conception, memory, imagination, 
are all interrelated, and are simply varying 
functions of one common process. More than 
that, every mental function must be explained 
by reference to something, or somebody, outside 



Introduction 17 

the inner life of the person who has the mental 
state — it cannot be understood apart from an 
environment. Treat a person as an independent 
"discrete entity," and no explanation can be 
given for anything that occurs within him. The 
clearest fact about him is his relationship. He 
is a social being. All the laws of his life are, in 
the ultimate analysis, social laws. The very hat 
which he wears, the smile on his face, the qualm 
of his conscience, have a social history. 

Human life is always some kind of "group" 
life, and it transcends our powers to imagine any 
person, high or low, who never had dealings be- 
yond the circle of his own private self. This 
idea, that personal life is of necessity conjunct, 
i. e., in an organic group, will appear in every 
chapter of this book, and whether the reader 
follows the writer farther in his conclusions or 
not, he can hardly fail to come away from his 
reading without having this idea very much alive 
within him. 

But the fact that personal life is conjunct must 
necessarily have profound religious significance. 
If man cannot be a self alone, no more can God. 
Love, if it is to be anything more than a bare 



18 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

abstraction, means that the one who loves, loves 
somebody that His life is interrelated with other 
lives. Now this book is written mainly to point 
out the fact and the extent and the significance 
of this Divine interrelationship. 

The older views of God regarded Him as being 
in another world, of totally other nature from 
our own and as being so absolute in Himself as 
to need nothing from us. These views did not 
fit our New Testament, but had been formed on 
the basis of a now dead philosophy and had 
become fixed and traditional. The doctrine of 
the conjunct and social nature of personality has 
made them impossible views for those who think. 
We realize now that our views of God must be 
grounded in the eternal nature of things and 
conform to the inherent facts of personal life, 
and that means that this conjunct, or spiritual 
" group," characteristic must run up to the 
highest scale of life, that even God finds His life 
and joy by going out of Himself and by bringing 
other lives to Himself. 

In one way or another the feeling has been 
growing that there must be a human side in the 
Divine nature — that the hard and fast distinc- 



Introduction ig 

tion between Deity and humanity is untenable. 
A God unrelated and absolute turns out to be 
forever unknowable. The dilemma is unescap- 
able — either God is to be thought of as inter- 
related and conjunct with us, or we are compelled 
to give up finding Him and sink back into a 
quiescent agnosticism ; for if we did not possess 
some common qualities, we could not know Him 
even though we found Him. The fact of the 
Incarnation ought to settle the question for all 
who accept it as a fact. It declares forever 
that the sharp duality of natures is impossible. 
Here God and man came together in a single, 
undivided life. The testimony of historical 
Christianity is plain and solid. 

Our latest science completely fits this testi- 
mony and confirms it. It finds everywhere 
common aspects in God and in man ; it accounts 
for the facts that God could show Himself 
humanly and that we have instinctive longings 
for Him. Its latest word is that God and man 
are conjunct. 

Wherever there is the feeblest spark of spir- 
itual life some social law is revealed. The poorest 
virtue in the list connects its possessor with his 



- 






20 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

fellows. If it is nothing more than honesty of 
which the man boasts, he is honest because he 
respects what belongs to others, he has guarded 
the rights and due claims of those among whom 
he lives. If it is the highest spiritual quality 
yet discoverable — as holiness, or sympathy — 
still the social bond is there. No man can be 
holy unto himself. If he sanctifies himself it is 
for somebody's sake. As there could be no 
gravitation in a universe which had only one 
"particle of matter," so there could be nothing 
properly called " spiritual" in a world which 
contained only one solitary person. Spiritual 
facts are bound up with social facts, spiritual 
laws with social laws. How this is so, the 
following chapters will sufficiently show. 

Such a book as this is written for persons who 
themselves do some thinking — not for those who 
are seeking for a volume which will relieve them 
from mental strain and effort. The reader here 
must be somewhat of a co-laborer with the 
writer, if he is to be benefited. He who has 
not yet reflected upon the problem of knowledge, 
for instance, who has never asked himself how 
an immaterial spirit not in space can know a 



Introduction 21 

physical object in space will hardly be ready 
for any intelligent consideration of the relation 
between the person and his world, or for any 
profoundly spiritual view either of man or God 
or the cosmos. 

He who lives in an easy world devoid of 
problems, need not enter here. The person who 
has not yet found any difficulties in his world 
has not gone out to sea far enough to discover 
why compass needles are a necessary part of 
ship furnishings, and he does not care whether 
the pole star is unvarying or not. It is the 
venturous man who has already made discoveries 
that has many questions to ask of those who 
have traveled farther. 

It is impossible here to give a list of persons 
and books that have contributed to the making 
of these pages. I owe a very great debt to my 
two teachers, Professor G. H. Palmer and Pro- 
fessor Josiah Royce, of Harvard. William James, 
of the same institution, has, through his books, 
been another teacher of great influence. Pro- 
fessor Baldwin's works on " Mental Develop- 
ment" have brought much light upon many of 
the matters here treated. John and Edward 



22 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

Caird have helped me more than any other 
British thinkers of recent times. These chapters 
have been given in an unfinished form at the 
Woodbrooke and Scarborough Summer Settle- 
ments in England and at the Haverford Summer 
School in this country. They are now given in 
fuller form to a wider " group, ' ' to a larger public. 
May they under the Divine blessing and through 
the Spirit of Truth bring light and help to many 
who are hungering and thirsting for righteous- 
ness. 

Haverford, Pa., Midsummer, 1904. 



Contents 



"We cannot Terminate ourselves in ourselves but we lose ourselves : 
we cannot be Ultimate and Final to ourselves ; who are not Original to 
ourselves." — Benjamin Whichcote. 

"Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe 
Thy only begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, to have ascended into the 
Heavens, so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with 
Him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy 
Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen." 

Collect for Ascension Day. 



Contents 

PAGE 

Introduction 9 

The Quest 27 

The Meaning of Personality 47 

The Realization of Persons 67 

Self-Sacrifice 87 

The Subconscious Life 107 

The Testimony of Mysticism 137 

The Inner Light 157 

The Test of Spiritual Guidance 177 

Faith as a Pathway to Reality 203 

The Self and the Over-Self 225 

The Divine-Human Life 247 



The Quest 



'Thou hast destroyed it, 

The beautiful world, 

With powerful fist: 

In ruin 'tis hurled 

By the blow of a demigod shattered! 

The scattered 

Fragments into the void we carry, 

Deploring 

The beauty perished beyond restoring. 

Mightier 

For the children of men, 

Brightlier 

Build it again, 

In thine own bosom build if anew ! 

Bid the new career commence, 

With clearer sense, 

And the new songs of cheer 

Be sung thereto I" 

Goethe's "Faust. 



The Quest 
x x 

On every hand we are dinned with the tale 
that this is a materialistic age. The hurry and 
rush of men possessed with a passion for wealth 
are evident enough. The tendency to make the 
goods of earth the end of human existence is 
real and ominous. It has lowered the tone of 
our press. It has allowed the money-changers 
to put their tables in our council rooms and 
legislative halls, and it has silently and uncon- 
sciously weakened the spiritual fibre of the 
Church. All this we are forced to admit. Much 
more than this may be the fact. 

And yet this is the astonishing counter-fact : 
In no age in human history have men been so 
urgent and insistent with questions on the 
nature and purposes of God. The great problems 
which have dignified and exalted our generation 
have not been engineering problems, but this 
strenuous and persistent search of mind and 
heart and will after a living God. Spite of the 

29 



30 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

crowds of easy livers, " untroubled by a spark," 
this has been a serious and solemn period. We 
have been taking life for the most part in dead 
earnest. There has been no lack of volunteers, 
ready for cosmic tasks, and a more genuine 
devotion to the truth has never lived in the 
world. Below the toss and tumble of the light 
waves which the shifting winds make, there is a 
steady tidal movement as obedient to the great 
issues of life as the seas are to the moon. Men 
are still true to the deep instinct which makes 
them seek a return home. Most persons would 
" listen on their knees" to anyone who would 
make God absolutely real to them, so that they 
could say as John did, "We have beheld His 
glory." The world is weary of traditional 
religion, of formalism and hollow words, but 
most hearts are hungry for that true thing by 
which life is actually renewed. 

To speak of the quest for God as the serious 
business of our age is in no way to question the 
reality of the revelation with which this Christian 
era began. Every serious man to-day realizes 
how profoundly all our thought of God is 
grounded in the Person of Christ and in the truth 
which His first interpreters declared as facts of 
their own experience. But nobody else's experi- 
ence can ever be a substitute for my own. The 



The Quest 31 

truth for me must be the truth I know, not 
the truth which I hear reported as once known 
by men of an earlier day. "Each generation," 
as George Macdonald has said, "must do its 
own seeking and finding. The fathers having 
found is only the warrant for the children's 
search." 

To admit that God was known in experience, 
but can now be known only by report, is to cast 
the deep taint of doubt upon all that is reported 
of Him. It means either that He has changed so 
that He cannot show Himself now, or that from 
the nature of the case man has become incapable 
of having a revelation of Him, however much 
God wills to show Himself. On the contrary, 
the revelation in the first century is the supreme 
warrant for our faith that God is essentially self- 
revealing and that man can find Him and know 
Him and become His organ of manifestation. 
The nearer we get to the original record and its 
real meaning, the less is it possible for us to stop 
satisfied with a record. The more profoundly 
we are impressed with its truth, the more com- 
pulsion we feel to possess the experience which 
flowered into these immortal documents. The 
belief, then, in the reality of a primitive revela- 
tion, far from checking our own quest for God, 
is just the flame which kindles us with assurance 



32 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

in our own personal quest — a quest which gives 
life its highest significance. 

Then, too, we must not overlook the great 
complexity of thought in our times as contrasted 
with the simplicity of the life and thought of 
those who had the experiences in the Divine 
Life which have ever since been the patterns in 
the mount for us. They knew next to nothing 
of cosmic systems. They had not taken the first 
steps in a science which links every fact in the 
universe in the chains of causality. They were 
untroubled by the overawing stellar spaces, 
crowded with world systems in all stages of 
development — in which swim suns in their 
genesis, planets growing cold, and stark dead 
satellites. They could comfortably tuck the 
entire earth history into the short span of four 
thousand years, while for us thought and imagi- 
nation are baffled as they try to follow back the 
process through a time whose unit of measure- 
ment is not years, but millenniums or aeons. 

History for them was in the main the story of 
Divine leadings and interventions in the course 
of the construction and discipline of one little 
commonwealth. From the nature of the case 
our thought of God must be somewhat different 
from theirs. We cannot take over unchanged 
the gift which they have to bestow We must 



The Quest 33 

perforce live in our world, and our view of God 
must fit our entire system of thought. 

The moral and spiritual character of God, as 
the New Testament reveals it, leaves nothing 
further to be desired in that sphere. Until we dis- 
cover some new human qualities higher than love 
and tenderness, higher than sacrifice and sym- 
pathy, we can hardly hope that a higher idea of 
God's nature will be revealed to men than that 
which was embodied in Jesus Christ and which 
lives in the great record. The God and Father 
of Jesus Christ is the God whom we, in our 
modern quest, want to know, and not another. 
But we want to know Him in such a way that 
our knowledge of Him will illumine our whole 
universe and not drive us into hopeless confusion 
by leaving us with a divine realm on the one 
hand yawningly separated from an un-divine 
compartment on the other. 

We have long ago settled the case that our 
mental life cannot be cut up into a lot of sun- 
dered faculties. There is no state of feeling or 
of volition which is not also thought, there is no 
thought which has not its aspect of feeling and 
activity. Mental life is always a unity. When 
unity is gone, consciousness is gone. So, too, 
our search for God cannot stop until it has found 
a Being who is an ultimate unity — toward whom 
3 



34 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

all things set and from whom all things flow : 
"In whom we live and move and are." He 
must explain our world of space and time. He 
must be the spring and motive of our ethical 
pursuits. He must be the ground and seed of 
our redeemed and victorious life. He must be 
no projected shadow of ourselves, but rather the 
Being in whose light we discover ourselves, and 
through whom we learn why it is that we love 
and suffer. 

How shall we start to find Him, or to prove 
that He can be found ? Where are we to look for 
Him? Many have fancied that He could be 
found at the end of a syllogism; logic could prove 
His existence and compel all persons who submit 
to the laws of this exact science to admit it. The 
argument is very simple. In its simplest form it 
proceeds from cause to effect. Here is some 
object. It must have been caused or made. 
Therefore there must be a First Cause or Maker. 
This argument is open to all sorts of objections. 
To pass by some of the profoundest ones, it will 
be enough to point out here that the most we can 
legitimately infer from the argument of causa- 
tion is that back of every event there is an 
infinite chain of causes. It does not lead us, 
and never can lead us, to an Absolute Being. 
If we say that the law of causality leads us to 



The Quest 3 5 

God, we must at once ask what caused Him and 
what was the cause of that cause. A God who 
was discovered by the causality argument would, 
too, of necessity be a finite god, however power- 
ful he might be, and we should have no good 
ground for saying he rather than it! Since 
Kant's time, it has been recognized that there 
is no logic which can carry us from a finite fact 
or event to an Absolute Being. 

Logic next tries the argument from design. 
Things in our world are adapted to ends. They 
seem made for uses and functions. Now design 
and adaptation presuppose a designer. As the 
watch implies a watchmaker, so the eye, with its 
fine adjustment to ether vibrations, implies a 
creative artist. With purpose everywhere in 
creation we must acknowledge a Being who 
planned it. Used in the right way there is no 
doubt that the argument from ends, or teleology, 
carries conviction and proves all materialistic 
views inadequate ; but the argument from design 
to a personal God does not convince any one who 
is not already convinced. 

In the first place, what we call design is the 
result of an infinite number of selections. 
Through a series of uncounted years by survi- 
vals of the fittest those beings that adjusted to 
the environment lived and those that did not 



36 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

are not here to show their lack of design. 
Everything that survived of necessity had 
design and adaptation. Then again, design 
after all is through and through subjective. It 
depends on our personal interests whether we 
find design or not. If one wishes to make music, 
a harp is admirably designed for his purpose. 
If, however, he wishes to cut a walking-stick, 
the harp which is in his hand lacks design for 
the end in view. The most that can be proved 
from design is the fact that man is a being who 
finds designs and ends and purpose everywhere 
in his world. 

Even if he leaps from design to a designer the 
most he could infer would be that there is, or 
was, a great Artist who has forced his thought 
into the stubborn matter of the world, but the 
Artist Himself will be forever outside and His 
character will remain unknown. 

Finally logic gives us what is known as the 
ontological argument, which is hoary with age 
and sacred because it has supported the faith of 
many saintly souls. In its simplest form it runs 
as follows : I find in my thoughts the idea of a 
perfect Being. Now perfection involves exist- 
ence, for a being who did not exist would not 
be as perfect as a being who did exist, therefore 
this perfect Being the idea of whom is in my 



The Quest 37 

thoughts must have real existence. As in both 
the former arguments, there is also a profound 
truth involved in the heart of this argument, but 
as it stands it is not a valid argument. The most 
we can say is tlrat if we think of a perfect Being, 
we must think of Him as existing. Whether He 
really does exist or not must be settled in some 
other way. The logical chain has always proved 
too weak to carry us from a finite — whether it 
be an event, or a design or an idea — to an infinite 
and absolute Reality. If we have no method of 
" proving" except the method of logic, then it is 
true that "nothing worthy proving can be 
proved, nor yet disproved." 

Long ago we outgrew the naive faith, so com- 
fortable while it lasted, that God may be found 
as an object in the world of space and time. We 
do not talk with a visible God in our studies and 
in our parlors as Abraham did at his tent door. 
" I have swept the universe, " triumphantly cries 
the undevout astronomer, "and I nowhere find 
God. " The worker in every department joins in 
the same voice: "I have dug through all the 
strata of the earth's crust; I found many curious 
fossils, but nowhere God " ; "I have traced back 
motion to an energy which manifests itself in 
every atom and which is never wasted, but I 
have found nothing but atom and energy." " I 



38 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

have followed life down its descending scale of 
differentiation until I have found its primal 
source in protoplasm, but I have nowhere found 
anything but natural forces." As of old He is 
not in the storm, He is not in the earthquake, 
He is not in the fire. Our rigid methods of 
scientific research increase our reverence and 
deepen our solemnity, but they do not and they 
cannot find God for us. Science deals only with 
describable things, i.e., one thing alongside other 
things, therefore this quest is not for science. 

We prosper hardly better when we turn back 
to primitive religions, to mythology, folk lore 
and anthropology. Religion does not declare its 
secret when it has been traced to its origins (for 
we cannot say origin). Whether man's dreams 
first made him religious, or his terror in the 
presence of overwhelming forces, or his inherent 
tendency to personify everything which mani- 
fests power, he no more found God in any mani- 
festation than we do to-day. On the contrary, 
religion is to be understood, if at all, at its 
height, not at its origin, as all man's spiritual 
gains must be appreciated. If religion does not 
find God to-day, it never did; and while myth- 
ology and anthropology are adding much to our 
knowledge of man and his stages of develop- 
ment, they cannot discover God for us. 



The Quest 39 

Once all this quest seemed unnecessary; for 
was not the Church His representative, His 
earthly vicar ? What the Church spoke through 
its hierarchy was as though God Himself spoke 
it; what the Church promised was as though 
promised from the eternal throne. In the bosom 
of the Church was peace. She could loose and 
bind, and her shrift was an assurance of entrance 
at the heavenly gate. It was unnecessary to 
search for God, for here was His agent who could 
perform all His offices on earth. He Himself 
had founded it — the living God. His hands had 
conferred the mystical power upon the first 
bishops and they had passed it on through the 
unbroken line. In the magic sacraments He 
Himself was present and became a vital part of 
the worshipper. As in the holy place of the 
Temple, so at the shrine in the Cathedral, He 
was manifest. But that easy faith has gone, 
never to return. No High Church movement can 
ever bring it back. It is a childhood faith, not 
for mature men. It may be revived for a passing 
hour, but it is as much doomed as the gods of 
Olympus. The Church may help us, and indeed 
must help us, to find God, but it shall not and 
cannot take His place. We still demand and 
seek Him. 

The difficulty of finding God by logic, or in 



40 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

the empirical world, i. e. } in the world of sense- 
objects, has hurried many thinkers, and some 
who think very little, into a hasty agnosticism. 
God is Unknowable, is their inference, because, 
if He is at all, He is beyond the realm which we 
know. Every fact which we link into our system 
of knowledge is a necessary fact. It has its cause 
in the natural realm and it can be described 
without a reference to anything except to other 
similar facts. We can know only the finite, the 
caused, the related. Beyond this realm of the 
natural there may be an Absolute Being, worthy 
of our reverence — a Power which makes for 
righteousness; but He, or It, remains and must 
remain not only unknown, but unknowable. It 
is this that makes William Watson say : 

" The God I never once behold 
Above the cloud, beneath the clod, 
The unknown God, the unknown God." 

It has made the sad, solemn note in both the 
prose and poetry of some very fine spirits in our 
own and in a previous generation. 

The age-long search lays bare two false con- 
ceptions of God. By one group He is conceived 
as a Being alongside of other beings — an object 
to be " found." Hard to reach, to be sure — like 
the North Pole, or the top of Mount Everest, 
but still there, in the sky or in the deep; either 



The Quest 41 

too near or too far to be easily found.* He is 
infinitely great and wise. He sees and hears and 
knows everything. He creates and directs 
things. He rules all things by laws which He 
has made, and He interferes, now here, now 
there, with the " natural" course of the world. 
The child thinks thus of Him as a superhuman 
being, living at some particular centre and yet 
at the same time reaching out to all places in an 
infinite circumference. Many persons go through 
life with a similar view. Others lose this childish 
faith and with it lose their belief in God. He is 
never " found," perhaps He does not exist: 

"The God I never once behold!" 

The other false conception assumes that 
because He is not an object in space, not one 
great being among other beings, therefore He 
must be in some realm beyond, in some world 
which finite beings never enter. Find Him we 
cannot, for we never go there. Know Him we 
cannot, for " knowledge is of things we see." 

* ' ' The fourteen centuries fall away 
Between us and the Afric Saint, 
And at his side we urge, to-day, 

The immemorial quest and old complaint. 

" No outward sign to us is given, 

From sea or earth comes no reply; 
Hushed, as the warm Numidian heaven 

He vainly questioned, bends our frozen sky." 

Whittier, "The Shadow and the Light." 



42 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

There is, or may be, beyond all things known 
and knowable a lonely Absolute, but we have no 
ladder which reaches up to Him and He never 
lets down a hand to us. Our " knowledge' ' can 
deal only with the finite, and He — He can never 
become finite. He inhabits the realm of calm 
beyond all that is seen and touched and known — 
"The unknown God, the unknown God."* 
But fortunately we find many realities in 
our world that are not " objects in space," that 
are not "things we see." A world reduced to 
mere describable things, "things we see," would 
be a very poor world indeed. It would not only 
be bare of God, but bare of everything worth 
living for, or dying for. Such a reduction of 
"knowledge" would strip away all ideals. All 
that moves us to high endeavor, all that ennobles 
and sanctifies us disappears. Man on this level 
would become as uninteresting as a sand-dune, 
as unspiritual as an extinct volcano on the moon. 
No, there are other paths to reality, besides this 
path of "knowledge," when it has been reduced 
to its lowest terms. We do not surrender love 

* This view, namely, that God is an Absolute Being, beyond 
everything which is, or can be, known, has been held by many 
distinguished persons in every age of human history. It is, 
however, responsible for very much of the agnosticism which 
has prevailed, and it has led to the types of "negative mysti- 
cism," which will be studied in a later chapter. 



The Quest 43 

and sympathy, goodness and patience, because 
we cannot dig them up with a pick or find them 
under the microscope. We look for them where 
they belong. They are not describable objects 
in space and time — so big, so long, so high! 
They are neither " things," nor are they in "a 
realm beyond things. " They are facts of personal 
life. They belong in the realm of spirit. We 
must look there for them, and we must use 
methods of search which suit that realm. To 
find them we do not arm ourselves with pick or 
lens or scalpel. We cannot start with brain-cells 
and then prove by a syllogism that beyond these 
brain -cells there must be goodness and love! 
We succeed in our search by learning to appre- 
ciate character; to feel the significance of deed 
and action; to estimate the worth of purposes 
and to value the whole trend of a life.* Here are 
pathways to reality, methods of knowing which 
are as safe and sure as any which are labeled 
" logical. " If we know the reality of " things we 
see," no less do we know the reality of what we 
appreciate and act upon. 

If our search for God is to have a happy issue 
we must first resist the tendency to narrow 
" knowledge. " We must rather insist on raising 

* HoefEding has defined religion as belief in the permanence of 
values, or of worth. 



44 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

it to its highest terms. We must include under 
the knowledge-process our entire capacity for 
dealing with reality. Secondly, we must look 
for God where He could be found — not in the 
wide stellar spaces, not "in eagle's wing or 
insect's eye," not at the end of a logical syllo- 
gism. If He is to be found at all we must look 
for Him in the spiritual realm. We must go at 
once where spirit manifests itself. All attempts 
to find God apart from and dissevered from 
personal life have failed, and of course always 
will fail. He is surely not less personal than 
we are. He will at least be as genuinely spiritual 
as we mortals are ! 

There is one approach to an infinite realm 
where God might be. There is one door that 
opens into a holy of holies. The true path is 
through personality. The search must begin in 
our own bosom : Who am I ? What do I live by ? 
What does personality involve? How am I 
related to my fellows and to nature ? What does 
my sense of worth imply? What do I mean by 
goodness? Can I draw any finite circle about 
"myself"? Do I have any dealings with "a 
Beyond"? These are questions which take us 
into regions where microscope and telescope do 
not avail, but the full answer to them would 
bring us to that which is. 



The Quest 45 

I shall make no pretense whatever to anything 
profound or final. These studies will all be 
untechnical. I am not writing a metaphysical 
treatise. I want to help earnest and perplexed 
seekers to find a good working conception of 
God and man's relation to Him. I want to show 
how interrelated all life is, and I want to indicate 
how solid the spiritual structure is. The plan 
of the work involves a study of the meaning and 
implications of personal life. That will include 
a study of both the conscious and the sub- 
conscious life. I shall examine too the testimony 
of the mystics — i. e., those persons who have had 
a private and personal conviction of a Divine 
Life invading their own, and I shall examine 
somewhat carefully the significance of the sense 
of worth or value, under the name of faith, as a 
way to reality. 

We shall see as we proceed that we at least 
live our lives in a unified spiritual world — that 
something divine is woven into the texture of 
our personal lives. We shall steadily find our-| 
selves, as we follow facts, moving toward a God 
who is Spirit, who has been revealed in a Person, 
and who can be found now because our finite 
spirits are interrelated with each other and with 
Him. We shall end with no god of the Olympus 
type, no capricious being above the cosmic 



46 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

storms and the din of human struggle,* but 
rather a Person who is the living Vine of all the 
branches of life, the Unity of all truth and 
beauty and goodness, the Alpha and Omega of 
all aspiration; who is revealed wherever love 
sutlers long and is kind; who shares His life 
with us ; who suffers in every sorrow and who is 
known through the same consciousness through 
which we know ourselves. 

* " The belief in gods as individuals resembling human beings, 
having an empirical existence somewhere and occasionally- 
acting upon our world, is dying out and will never be revived. 
And it is immaterial whether we assume several such beings or 
a single one. A monotheistic scheme, which conceives God as 
an individual by the side of others and permits him occasion- 
ally to act upon the world as upon something external and 
foreign to him, does not essentially differ from polytheism." — 
Paulsens "System of Ethics," p. 426. 



The Meaning of Personality 



" Man knows partly but conceives beside, 
Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact, 
And in this striving, this converting air 
Into a solid he may grasp and use, 
Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone, 
Not God's and not the beast's: God is, they are, 
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." 

Browning's "A Death in the Desert." 

" Say thou, I AM hath sent me." 

Exodus iv. 14. 



The Meaning of Personality 

There are many things which we know until 
we are asked. We get on comfortably with our 
beliefs until some inquisitive person asks us to 
state them, or until our first child begins the 
well-known cataclysm of questions and whys, 
and we are left never again quite so sure as 
before. Those of us who teach are familiar with 
the honest answer, " I know, but I cannot tell"; 
which we refuse to accept, though we inwardly 
sympathize with the student's difficulty. 

We all know well enough what a "person" is 
until an insistent questioning forces us deeper. 
But if we are to get to any adequate idea of God, 
we must have just this deeper view of the mean- 
ing of personality, for all our search and research 
are plainly showing us that the one sure path to 
the divine Person is through the human person. 
If the inland dweller would bring his boat to the 
sea, he must perforce explore the river which sets 
that way. 

4 49 



50 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

We all split the universe into a self and a not- 
self, and this division seems to work well until 
we ask where the line of cleavage is to be drawn. 
We soon discover that there is some of " self" in 
everything. Is the body the self or the not-self ? 
Is the house I have built, the book I have 
written, the child who is born to me, mine or 
rather me?* Everybody knows how a fire, or a 
financial crisis or the invisible messenger passes 
and leaves us shrunken because something of 
our very self has gone. We could hardly lose 
the stars without losing something of this real 
selfhood. This means that we cannot sharply 
cut asunder the self and the not-self. They are 
not two independent things so that either would 
be the same if the other were gone. There are 
no such things as "an inner world" and "an 
outer world" which are separable. The world 
which is our "not-me," that is to say, the stub- 
born outside world, turns out to be thoroughly 
soaked full of mind. When we say we "know" 
this world, we mean that it is a world which can 
come into our mind, which can be thought. It is 
something related to the mind that knows it, and 
if we took out of it all that is subjective, all that 
our thought supplies, i. e., all of the "me" that 
is in it, who can tell what would be left I 

*See Chapter X in James' ''Psychology," Vol. I. 



The Meaning of Personality 51 

But for all practical purposes the contrast 
between a person and a thing — between a self 
and a not-self — is clear enough. The funda- 
mental contrast is the possession of self-con- 
sciousness by the person and the absence of it 
in the thing. Nobody ever was a person without 
knowing it ! The ' ' marks ' ' of personality are 
(1) power to forecast an end or purpose and to 
direct action toward it, (2) ability to remember 
past experiences and to make these memories 
determine present action, and (3) the power of 
selecting from among the multitude of objects 
presented to consciousness that which is of worth 
for the individual. But wherever we discover 
these " marks" we infer that there is self -con- 
sciousness, such as we have ourselves. If we 
found an individual who could forecast, and 
remember, and direct action and make selections, 
and who yet did not know that he knew and did 
not think that he thought, we should decline to 
call him a person. However important these 
outer marks or " signs" are, the essential char- 
acteristic is a unified self -consciousness. 

Now do we know what self-consciousness is? 
Perfectly well — until we are asked. But a 
description of it is never forthcoming. There is 
nothing simpler by which we could describe it. 
It itself is ultimate (at least to us) , elementary 



52 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

and unanalyzable. It is involved in every 
description we try to give, it is presupposed in 
every effort to grasp it ; it must be used in every 
attempt to analyze it. In vain should we try to 
give any hint of its meaning to a creature which 
lacked it, and our descriptive phrases are ex- 
hausted when we have said, " You yourself know 
what it is, by having it." 

Nobody, then, can be called a " person " 
unless he bears in the structure of himself these 
" marks," and still further, unless he knows that 
he knows. It goes without saying, therefore, 
that, even though "poets are born and not 
made," nobody is born " a person." Personality 
is not a primitive possession; it is slowly 
achieved. No mortal knows, or even attempts 
to guess, how it can begin to be. The difficulty 
is as great as the difficulty of conceiving the 
beginning of the universe. Nor can we put our 
finger on the exact moment when a given indi- 
vidual begins to be a person. It is precisely as 
easy to decide when man arrived in the long 
chain of evolving life, as it is to say when one 
who "comes from out the boundless deep" 
begins to be actually " a person." 

The first thing in the way of consciousness is 
a dim awareness of organic states — a confused 
mass of immediate experiences, which not only 
in babyhood, but to the end of life, make up the 



The Meaning of Personality S3 

core of our sense of selfhood. They give us what 
has been called the "at home" feeling in the 
body; but these undifferentiated organic states 
of themselves would never give us selfhood, or 
at least it would be a selfhood hardly richer than 
that of a polyp. Mothers and poets alike have 
noticed that " babies new to earth and sky ' ' have 
no consciousness of self. They do not say "I," 
and they apparently do not discover for some 
time that they are other than the things they 
touch. How out of the mass of subjective states, 
"common sensations," as they are sometimes 
called, which mark the twilight period of con- 
sciousness, does clear self -consciousness arise? 
It never would arise apart from social influence. 
It would be as impossible to develop a person- 
ality without human society as it would be to 
convey sound in a vacuum, or to maintain life 
without atmosphere . The child, if we can imagine 
him living on without a human environment, 
would never get beyond what has already been 
called his " organic self , " his awareness of certain 
"warm and intimate" feelings which give him the 
sense of "at homeness" in the body, and which 
probably most animals possess in some degree.* 

* Could a child grow up with lifeless natures, writes a 
modern psychologist, "there is nothing to indicate that he 
would become as self-conscious as is now a fairly educated cat." 
— Royce, " Studies of God and Evil," p. 208. 



54 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

He becomes truly self-conscious because he is 
born an organic member in a social whole. Here 
he learns the contrast between " I " and " thou," 
"ego" and " alter," and between "self" and 
"not-self," as we shall see. Almost from the 
first, as though it were instinctive, the child 
reacts toward persons differently than toward 
anything else in his environment. In the second 
month of life he distinguishes the touch of his 
mother in the dark, and even earlier than this he 
has formed a peculiar way of behaving toward 
persons. But the most decided advance is made 
through imitation. There are few life-crises to 
compare in importance with the "budding" of 
imitation, which is well under way about the 
end of the first half-year. Slowly the facts are 
compelling us to admit that the range and scope 
of inheritance have been overemphasized. Much 
which was thought to be transmitted by heredity, 
we now know is gained by imitation both uncon- 
scious and conscious. The child is the most 
imitative being known to man, and this function 
of imitation is one of his most effective means 
for the mastery of the world, but its importance 
in the formation of selfhood has been fre- 
quently overlooked. From the beginning the 
child imitates persons. They are the fascinat- 
ing objects whose movements fix his atten- 



The Meaning of Personality 5 

tion. The mother's smile makes him smile. 
The sad face and drooping lip are quickly imi- 
tated after the seventh month. The bodily 
actions which result from imitation give the 
child an experience which enables him in some 
degree to grasp the inner meaning of the persons 
before him. He imitates their deeds and in the 
process discovers a new and richer mental life, 
which furnishes material for interpreting farther 
the actions of other persons. In these responses 
to personal expressions there is to be found the 
nucleus of real emotions and no less surely the 
nucleus of volition. From now on, the child is 
not passive amid the play of forces in his environ- 
ment. He learns to act by imitating actions, 
and through his actions he grows conscious of 
his powers. Thus through these early imitative 
processes there arises the first germ of conscious 
distinction between the self and the other* and 
there dawns also that sense of power on one's 
own act, which is, in fact, one of the main miracles 
of life. A little later the child begins his slow 
mastery of human language, through which, as 
everybody knows, his mental life is unspeakably 
heightened and his personality denned. Here 
again imitation is the main function which makes 

* See Baldwin's "Mental Development " and Royce's " Studies 
of Good and Evil," pp. 169-248. 



56 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

this new achievement possible. The first words 
are all easy imitative sounds; then when the 
great secret is caught, progress becomes rapid; 
but from beginning to end, language is a social 
creation and could be attained only in society. 
Without it the gains of the past could never be 
inherited and without it very slender contribu- 
tions could be made to the future, and that would 
mean that without it, conscious life would shrink 
into exceedingly narrow limits. The selfhood 
which we know could never be, without this 
achievement of self -utterance through social rela- 
tionship. Every step of progress thus far in the 
path toward personality is made possible by the 
social environment, and it can be positively 
asserted that there can be self-consciousness 
only through social consciousness. 

Now as soon as some small degree of self- 
consciousness is attained the little " person" 
begins to read himself into the persons about 
him and through his own experiences they 
become illuminated for him. They do things as 
he does, therefore they must feel as he does. 
He quickly learns, however, that in his little 
circle the persons with whom he deals are very 
different. He finds that he can act toward a 
little sister differently than he can toward his 
father. The nurse, too, calls for a different 



The Meaning of Personality 



57 



reaction than his mother. He has a small world 
of selves to react upon and every experience 
here enriches his own sense of selfhood and helps 
him define through social contrasts the " I " and 
the " thou. " Already it is clear enough that the 
"self " and the " other" are born together, that 
personal selfhood is organic with the society in 
which it is formed, but the moment we touch 
any of the spiritual qualities — even the simplest 
— which belong to personality it grows clearer 
still. You cannot sympathize without "an- 
other ' ' — another whose inner life you can appre- 
ciate and with whom in some real sense you can 
share. Take away this power of contrasting a 
self and another with the power of identifying 
this self and its other, and you have removed all 
possibility of sympathy. In like manner every 
possibility of virtue would vanish. But so, too, 
would the so-called " egoistic tendencies ' ' vanish. 
Pride and self-esteem and the rest of the list of 
egoisms go when the contrast of self and other 
is removed. If I have self-esteem it is because 
I read myself off as important in the eyes of 
others. There is no truth at all in any view 
which makes egoism more primitive or funda- 
mental than altruism. They are born together 
and neither can claim the birthright, however 
much one may get the blessing over the other. 



58 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

Take away the other and there would never be 
an ego. 

The point, then, which these facts out of the 
life of early childhood establish is this : there is 
no such thing as bare individuality, nor could 
society be the result of a " social contract." 
Individuality does not come first and society 
next as a product. Society is fundamental, and 
it is an essential condition for self-consciousness 
and personality. However contradictory it may 
sound, it is nevertheless a fact that there could 
be no self without many selves. Self -conscious- 
ness is a possible attainment only in a world 
where it already exists. Personality at every 
stage involves interrelation. An absolutely iso- 
lated self is as contradictory as an outside that 
has no inside. To be a person, then, means to 
be a conscious member in a social order. Every 
effort to discover the meaning of personality 
carries us straight over into the problems of the 
social life. 

The world of nature, too, which is the sphere 
of all our activities and which we incessantly 
contrast with the inner self — this seemingly 
stubborn outer realm owes its reality and order 
to this same social relationship. Without a 
reliance upon the social consciousness I should 
have no categories for thinking an organized 



The Meaning of Personality 59 

natural world. Its existence can never be 
severed from that of the social order of which 
I am a part. 

It is because we as persons are interrelated 
spirits that we have a common world in which 
we can work out our destinies. We are all 
inclined to accept "the world beyond us" as 
though it were given to us just as it is in itself. 
We get along comfortably with this view, as our 
far ancestors did with the Ptolemaic astronomy, 
which made the sun go round the earth, until 
we reflect. It takes very little reflection, how- 
ever, to disturb us in that easy view. Through 
our senses, which appear to be our only means of 
communicating with a world outside, we receive 
nothing but bare sense qualities, such as redness, 
loudness, roughness, heaviness, sweetness, pun- 
gency, and so following. No " object" from the 
world outside ever did, or ever could, come into 
a mind through an organ of sense and " present ' ' 
itself. Perception of objects is an elaborate 
process of mental construction out of this 
" material" which sense furnishes. Our "baby 
new to earth and sky" has a " color patch" on 
his retina when his mother is in the room. But 
it is a most difficult and complex process to 
translate this flat color patch into an " object," 
and the mystery is that it ever gets done. At 



60 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

first when trie mother is near, the patch is large, 
and accordingly the mother is seen large. When 
she is distant, the patch is small, and this time 
she is seen small. As she moves her size changes. 
No object gets its fixed size until the child has 
learned how to translate into distance the feeling 
of the muscle strain which accommodates and 
converges the eye. Then at length the ether 
vibrations which come from the mother at any 
distance are read off as this definite mother of 
well-known and unchanging size. Of course 
touch, movements and sound are all the time 
helping toward this achievement. But to the 
end of life we have no ultimate proof that objects 
keep their sizes, except that we in common with 
our fellows act upon the supposition that they 
are approximately unchanging. And the facts 
seem to bear us out as we act. Our skill in 
measuring, which more than anything else con- 
firms our belief in the stability of objects, is a 
social triumph and has had a very slow growth. 
But we never get to know — really to know — 
objects until we learn their use and their names. 
If we suddenly forgot how to use every object 
which came to our hand or our eye and at the 
same time its name refused to rise to thought, 
we should find ourselves in a world of objects 
practically unknown to us. But just this power 



The Meaning of Personality 6i 

to use and to name is a social attainment. We 
acquire our skill in " labeling" our objects from 
our fellows, and without this power our world 
would largely fall back into chaos. Everything 
we know about the world, even the most abstract 
things — such as laws of motion, ether vibrations, 
atomic weights, multiplication tables — have be- 
come known to us because they fulfil social pur- 
poses, and because they are verified in the 
experience of many persons. It need hardly be 
said that one person alone in a world would have 
no laws. Succession of phenomena — if we could 
grant him phenomena — would be the most he 
could get. He would have no way of distinguish- 
ing the reality of dreams, hallucinations, imagi- 
nations and real objects. They would all stand 
for him on the same level of objectivity. A fact 
is a fact for us only because it is there for every 
sane man. Our description of it tallies with 
what our fellow says he sees. Our hallucination 
is an hallucination because we can get no one to 
confirm it. Our belief in the reality of nature 
is through and through bound up with our 
belief in the existence of our fellows and in 
their testimony. Taste and smell do not 
give us much sense of external reality mainly 
because we cannot see or feel anybody else 



62 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

taste or smell things, as we see them touch and 
see things.* 

How we come to get an external world at all 
is a most puzzling question. The easy answer is, 
of course, something resists us or impinges on us 
and we infer its reality outside us. We know 
that we have a mental state, and we infer that 
it must have been caused by something not our- 
selves. But here we face an overwhelming 
difficulty. Where did we discover causation — 
where did we learn that everything is caused? 
Not from facts in the external world, since it is 
by means of this very principle of causation that 
we are supposed to infer an external world. If 
causation is to be used at all as an argument in 
the construction of a belief in an external world 
it must be admitted as a primary and elemental 
fact of consciousness — not as something derived 
from the world. The world as we know it is a 
world causally organized — a linked and describ- 

* There have been many attempts in fiction to describe the 
development of a child left on some uninhabited island. One 
of the most famous of these attempts is in a book called " The 
History of Hai Eb'n Yockdan, or The Self -Taught Philosopher." 
It was written in Arabic and was translated into English in 
1685. Many of its early readers, including Robert Barclay, the 
Quaker apologist, took it for a true history! It is a feat of 
metaphysical imagination. The " self-taught philosopher " 
and the transmutation of lead to gold are on the same level of 
possibility. 



The Meaning of Personality 63 

able system, where everything is related. But 
it is what it is for us because this process of 
organization and description has had an imme- 
morial social history. We "find" our world 
largely because it is already described, and we 
can verify our principle of causation in the ex- 
perience of contemporaries and the records of 
all who went before. This trust in the experience 
of others gives us a common world for social 
duty, and thus we work out our destinies to- 
gether. We can act together only after experi- 
ence has given us some unchanging laws which 
unify our purposes. We can express ourselves 
only after we have discovered our common rela- 
tion to something that will do for a standard 
between us. 

What a world would be out of relation to our 
common consciousness — a world devoid of laws, 
a world not causally unified, a world not viewed 
through our common form of space, a world 
entirely bare of our " thought elements" — we 
cannot remotely guess. The world we know is 
the world which is valid for our common experi- 
ence. Everything in it is a reality for thought. 
Everything we know of it turns out to be mental. 
Even the seemingly stark dead " matter" of 
which we suppose the world to be made, is 
matter which is obedient to laws and is soaked 



64 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

with mental qualities and attributes. Is this 
world which we find in thought the real world, 
or is there another world out there somewhere 
beyond, which is non-spiritual but more real — 
in fact the real world? All we can say is that if 
there is such a world, an independent world 
beyond, it is for ever unknowable to us. It is 
as though it were not. From the nature of the 
case we could not know whether it were or were 
not. It would be like Alice's "grin without the 
cat," it would have nothing to express itself 
through. Our world is the one we know. It is 
the world which rests immovably on the basis of 
social experience. Examine any object in it and 
we find our ''knowledge" to be rooted in this 
immemorial social consciousness, through which 
we have learned to think. Destroy the social 
fabric and all that we now call "nature" would 
vanish as the shadow vanishes when the object 
which cast it is gone. But note well the world 
of nature is not the product of my consciousness 
or your consciousness, but of the total whole of 
consciousness, and that proves finally to include 
God. 

The world of order and law and beauty is not 
something which exists apart, something which 
is there before consciousness. It has being and 
reality only because consciousness has being and 



The Meaning of Personality 65 

reality. The outer and the inner are as much 
one unity as the convex and concave sides of the 
sky are one sky. There is no approach to the 
world at all except through consciousness. We 
have discovered, however, that our own con- 
sciousness is but a fragment. It has its being 
and reality in a larger whole, without which it 
could not be. Our two significant conclusions 
thus far will, then, be: (1) Personality involves 
a union in a social, spiritual whole; (2) the very 
basis and ground of the world we know lies in 
this fact of interrelated personalities. But a 
deeper analysis shows that this finite social con- 
sciousness is a fragment. A later study will 
discover that the spiritual relationships, the 
ethical structure of society and the solid reality 
of the universe itself can be accounted for only 
on the basis of a Divine Unity in whom all self- 
conscious persons have their root and life, a 
living Personality who is what we aim to be. 
In the old Norse legend the god Thor tried to 
empty the drinking-horn in the games of Utgard, 
but he could not drain it, though he tried long 
and fiercely. Again, he tried to lift a gigantic 
cat, but could not with all his god-like strength. 
He failed because the horn which he tried to 
drink was the endless ocean, and the cat which 
he would have lifted was the whole created 



66 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

world — the Midgard serpent with tail in mouth, 
fit symbol of the infinite circle. So, too, when 
we assay a word about personality we find our- 
selves in the mesh of the universe. Each self, 
which seems so easily girded and spanned, is 
bound into a system of the world, and if we 
could drop our plummet down through the deeps 
of one personality we could tell all the meanings 
of the visible world, all the problems of social 
life and all the secrets of the eternal Personal 
Self. 



The Realization of Persons 



"The spiritual progress of mankind is an unmeaning phrase unless it 
means a progress of personal character and to personal character. It is 
simply unintelligible unless understood to be in the direction of more 
perfect forms of personal life. . . . This consideration may suggest 
the true notion of the spiritual relation in which we stand to God; that 
He is not merely a Being who has made us, in the sense that we exist as 
objects of the divine consciousness in the same way in which we suppose 
the system of nature so to exist, but that He is a Being in whom we exist; 
with whom we are in principle one ; with whom the human spirit is iden- 
tical, in the sense that He is all which the human spirit is capable of 
becoming." — T. H. Green, in "Prolegomena to Ethics." 



The Realization of Persons 



Personality, as we have seen, is always 
an achievement. A Person is the only thing 
in the universe that can realize itself. But 
how that which is not yet makes itself to be is 
a puzzle as old as the world. It helps us but 
little to say in the Latin phrase, which has often 
been used to conceal ignorance, that a self-con- 
scious being is causa sui; or as Wordsworth 
puts it in his fine verse : 

" So build we up the being that we are." 

How can that which is not cause itself to be ? 
We have traced the early stages of self -con- 
sciousness, and we have seen how absolutely 
dependent the developing self is upon his fellows. 
But this social influence must not be pushed too 
far. It is not creative, and it can never confer 
personality. Only in society can personality be 
won, but it must be won. The will to be is some- 
thing elemental, and until it asserts itself society 
can do absolutely nothing to make a person. 

6 9 



70 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

We have found that the inner life first grows 
defined through a contrast between self and 
other. The little imitating subject soon dis- 
covers that there are activities and experiences 
beyond him. He finds himself trying for some- 
thing not yet his. He "projects" something in 
his fellow which he has not in himself, but which 
he wants. He now gets the inner feeling of 
strain and effort which forms the nucleus of 
volition. In these dim processes the character- 
istic thing is the contrast between "self" and 
that which is not yet "self" — a central core of 
experience and a something more to be reached 
for. The final result of these complex actions 
and corresponding feelings is the power to con- 
trast a present self with a past self and so, too, 
with a future self. We thus come into possession 
of that power which the great poets have made 
so much account of — the power "to look before 
and after." 

A being who lacked this vision of a potential 
future self could never develop a personality. 
A feeling of contrast between this present and a 
possible future is the first requisite for advance. 
There must be presented to consciousness a 
better state of existence than has yet been 
realized. It must appeal to consciousness fur- 
thermore, as a condition which would satisfy if 



The Realization of Persons 71 

it were put in the place of the actual present 
state. When we speak, then, of an ideal we 
never mean a merely possible future state, but 
a conceived future state which attracts — some- 
thing inwardly dynamic. Ideals are not blood- 
less, ineffectual dreams or fancies which come 
and go and leave us where we were. Our real 
ideals are propulsive and directive. They go 
over into life, and make us what we become. 
All changes, so far as we know, below the realm 
of self-consciousness are changes which are 
caused by a force acting from behind — a tergo, 
i. e., a force which acts through a causal link. 
Thus the engine draws the train. The moon 
moves the tide. The wind blows down the tree. 
The forces of nature develop the plant. None 
of these things select or choose. They are caused 
from without. They are the effects of causes 
which can be described, and they are effects 
which can be accurately predicted. 

When we pass over from causation acting 
from behind to changes produced by ideals in 
front, we cross one of the widest chasms in the 
world. It is one of those facts which disproves 
the easy proverb, "Nature abhors breaks." It 
seems like a passage from one world-system to 
another world-system of a totally different sort. 
In one case the moving cause is an actual, exist- 



72 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

ing situation antecedent to the effect; in the 
other, the moving cause is an unrealized ideal — 
something which as yet does not exist in the 
world of describable things at all. We act to 
realize something which has induced us to act 
before it existed in the world of things. The 
entire spiritual development of persons is of this 
a fronte type. Below man everything is moved 
by coercion. If things are moving toward a goal, 
they themselves know nothing about it, and it 
must either be accounted for as an accident or 
we must admit that from a deeper point of view 
all causation would be discovered to be toward 
a goal in front. In this case the end and goal 
would be present from the first as a directive 
force in the entire process of evolution. 

However that may be — and let the man who 
soaks his evolutionary terms with purpose pause 
and reflect — it is certain that in a person the 
ought goes beyond the is, the vision of the poten- 
tial makes the present actual unsatisfying and 
insufficient. It stands clear, of course, that no 
power on earth could force an ideal upon us, nor 
could the empirical, i. e., the describable world, 
give it to us, for from the nature of the case an 
ideal transcends everything that is realized. As 
soon as it is actual it ceases to be an ideal. But 
on the other hand, ideals are no more to be 



The Realization of Persons 73 

created out of nothing than a material world is. 
They are as truly grounded in reality as is the 
simplest actual fact, as the mountain peak is 
grounded in the common earth. The wish of the 
beggar produces no horse, the sigh of the old 
man for the days of his youth puts no vigor into 
the slow-flowing blood, rather it tends to make 
him older. The directive and dynamic ideal 
must spring out of what is. It must not be less 
true, but more true, than any present fact. 

We shall now see how the fact of an ideal takes 
us again into a social order. The ideal, which 
rules and sways and so develops a person, is never 
an individual creation; it has had its birth in 
society. Existing society always gives the direc- 
tion to one's aims and it always forms the 
environment in which our true ideals take shape. 
As well might one try to build a bridge to the 
milky way as to try to get self-realization by 
ignoring the already accomplished stages of 
human endeavor and human striving. 

Social customs, family traditions, established 
law, the ideals of art, literature and religion — all 
these are indispensable to the formation of a 
personal ideal. We begin to move out from a 
point which was once the highest goal of some 
earlier member of the race. The attainments of 
individuals and of society give body and filling 



74 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

to our purposes. It is in this rich and fertile 
seed field that our own ideal sprouts forth and 
we never get beyond the guidance and direction 
of what has already been attained. Let him be 
ever so creative or revolutionary a man must 
always bear the birth and nurture marks of his 
age, and the moment he cuts loose from the 
social whole, through which he has come to be 
what he is, he tries to fly in a vacuum. It is 
impossible to be a person without being in the 
broad sense a member of society, a citizen of a 
state, for it is through the organized life of the 
world that one comes to himself. It is among 
men that one learns what he can be. To with- 
draw into an isolated life to nourish one's noble 
dreams is to lose the one chance of finding a 
real ideal which will construct a life. We know 
nothing of any ideals which have not sprung out 
of the human struggles of the past. 

We gather up the tattered fragments of old 
papyrus in the hope of catching the secret of a 
long buried past ; we are eager to see what aims 
and passions and hopes lay at the heart of men 
then. We dig painfully for the broken bits of 
clay which reveal the purposes of the old Assy- 
rian warriors because they throw light on the 
entire meaning of life, ours as well as theirs. All 
history is sacred history. It is the region out of 



The Realization of Persons 75 

which the rivers of our own lives have run. His- 
tory is the merciless judgment-seat where all 
ideals have been tested, and woe to him who 
scorns or ignores the decisions of this tribunal. 
It has taken a thousand years to ripen the idea 
which we accept almost as instinctive. Whole 
ages have sifted out the literature by which we 
form our minds. The standards of taste and of 
right and wrong which we recognize have come 
through the testings of long centuries. Our in- 
stitutions are the embodiment of the ideals of 
former generations, and they safeguard all our 
ethical ideals to-day. The home is one of man's 
supreme creations. It is the expression of human 
endeavor which began thousands of years before 
the earliest clay tablet was scratched. Without 
it modern morality and our modern ideals would 
be impossible. The state with its tremendous 
system of restraining evil action and of serving 
us in multiform ways is the outgrowth of the 
efforts of the entire race since man became a 
social being. It is no invention, no devised 
arrangement. It is the culmination of slowly 
developing ideals. But if we were not organic 
with this past and with the life of the world 
these slow gains would be nothing to us. Now 
they are the very blood of our life. 

The Church, or as we should prefer to say, 



76 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

embodied religion in the world, has in the same 
way become an intimate part of the life we live. 
These great ideals of life which religion gives us 
have a racial history, and they come to us with 
a sanction greater than that of antiquity. We 
cannot trace them to any human source which is 
adequate to account for them. Into the atmos- 
phere of religious ideals we are all born. The 
literature of revelation is put into our hands. 
The stories of saints and the victories of martyrs 
are in our nurseries and inspire us from the time 
thought begins. What we should be without this 
inheritance of the past, how we should fare if we 
cut away from the great religious ideals of the 
race, no one can dimly imagine. The school 
takes us and drills into us the accumulated gains 
of man in all the fields of research. The child first 
beginning to read learns many facts about nature 
which escaped the penetrating eye of Aristotle 
and the boy reading his school astronomy or 
physiology laughs at the curious views of Plato. 
Through the school each generation is helped to 
master the labors of all its predecessors. We 
start from the heights which they have reached. 
In his search for truth in any field the seeker is 
interrelated with the entire past. He is a mem- 
ber of a whole, and without society he finds no 
truth whatever. There is then no self-realization 



The Realization of Persons 77 

for any individual who is only a bare individual. 
He can advance toward personality only by 
being an organic member of a whole. 

But, as we have sufficiently seen, society does 
not give us ideals. It gives us only existing, or 
historical, situations. Out of the material of our 
world we construct ideals. The correlation of 
forces drives the natural object along the line of 
least resistance — it goes as it must. The dawning 
person, on the other hand, makes a wholly novel 
reaction. He perceives the given and then thinks 
beyond it. If that which rises beyond the actual 
proves attractive he acts to realize it, and in 
doing so realizes himself. Two principles are 
fundamental to thought, as fundamental as 
gravitation to a material world: (1) Every state 
of consciousness is a unity, i. e., whatever is 
known is known together in one whole in a single 
pulse with the self that knows it, and (2) in 
every moment of consciousness thought tran- 
scends everything that is given to it. Whatever 
we unify in this present thought, we think as 
part of a still larger whole. The very nature of 
consciousness compels us to go beyond what we 
have. To know a limit is already to have tran- 
scended it ! To realize an actual situation is to 
have seen beyond it. Ideals are thus involved 
in the very structure of the finite life, and this 



78 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

fact is big with significance for some future 
insights, which will appear in due time. 

Like everything else which figures in human 
experience, the ideal, which later proves such a 
dynamic affair, has its day of small things. At 
first the ideal good is puny and slender and 
hardly prophetic of much. The first purposive 
selections are organic and hardly more moral or 
spiritual than is the blooming of the wild rose. 
But all movements have their results and leave 
their associations behind. Little by little im- 
pulses get a value. They are no longer blind 
and resistless. Amid the collision of impulses a 
choice is made because the little being is now 
able to forecast a good which will come from the 
choice. This good may be soaked with selfish- 
ness, but nevertheless the moment of choice is a 
crisis of stupendous import. In every instance 
of a choice of some particular thing which is a 
good for us, we are also choosing the particular 
self which we shall be, and the consequences of 
our choice react upon us and teach us, if so be 
that we are teachable. The world is unspeak- 
ably sensitive to our choices. In the gravitate 
system the earth rises to meet the dropped 
pebble. Hardly less responsive is the world into 
which we drop our deed. The stars in their 
courses fight for us or against us as we choose 



The Realization of Persons 79 

rightly or wrongly. The entire social world 
prospers or sutlers from our act, and its meaning 
comes back upon us. Our after-choices are made 
in the light of these experiences and gradually 
our ideal of what is good grows clearer. 

There is not at first — and perhaps in some 
persons never — a great ground-swell which 
sweeps through the entire being and guides all 
our acts as the magnetic pole draws all needles 
toward itself. Rather our ideal is a steadily 
moving one, which shapes itself as we live. We 
act each time to realize something not yet actual, 
but whose actuality is presented to us as a good ; 
and that attainment helps us define our ideal 
still farther. It is formed in much the same 
way the artist's ideal is formed. He does not 
create at a jet. As he works upon his material, 
the outlines of form which were first shadowy 
grow sharp and clear. He discovers what he 
really meant all the time, though his vision was 
too weak to image it until he had the help of the 
partly formed matter to guide him. So too the 
poet's plot grows as the characters begin to take 
shape in the early scenes. Somewhat so we use 
the concrete goods which we have already real- 
ized as stepping-stones to a highest good which is 
not yet on land or sea, which touches every aim 
of our life and gives system and unity to all our 



80 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

choices. Every rational act of ours helps make 
this ideal actual in our lives, and as fast as it 
becomes real in us, we realize ourselves as 
persons. 

But the path is sadly strewn with blunders. 
There are only some ideals which nature and 
society will allow us to realize, and all ideals are 
likely to encounter obstacles. We must discover 
amid pains and perils the possible line of march, 
and we must be resolute enough to go on in spite 
of stubborn and relentless hindrances. The 
world has a solid structure which must perforce 
be adjusted to. Nature weeds out those who 
blindly beat their heads against her thick-bossed 
shield. In a thousand ways society impresses 
its "thou shalt not" upon the newcomer and 
he learns which ideals are "live" and which 
are "dead" for the world into which he has 
come. 

But society does not stop with these methods 
of restraint. It has slowly through the centuries 
organized a marvelous system of education. It 
tells the learner what the race has learned. It 
trains him to forecast results without the pains 
and penalties of personal experience. It presents 
to him the ideals of the past, the fruit of the ages. 
It brings him into the presence of great pattern 
lives which reveal a high and noble type to aim 



The Realization of Persons 8i 

at. It trains and disciplines him for an occupa- 
tion which will give scope for his capacities. 

Self-realization is, in fact, never well under 
way until the person finds the task for which he 
is fitted and begins to make his positive contribu- 
tion to the work of the world. Only by means 
of well-directed labor can one find his place in 
the social order or discover what it is possible 
for him to become. The inner life develops 
mainly through motor activities which are 
guided and disciplined by a fixed occupation. 
All labor directed by the reason and performed 
for the common good tends to bring the true 
end and purpose of life into clearer view. This 
again carries us out of the isolated life into a 
common social order in which our tasks all lie. 
In this busy world of toiling men there is an 
ascending hierarchy of persons taking their part. 
At the bottom is the pitiable individual who 
turns his work into grinding servitude and labors 
sullenly with the sole aim of keeping his body 
alive. At the top is the consecrated spirit who 
throbs with joy and love as he does the best 
within him to add his contribution to the grow- 
ing spiritual life of the world. But whether high 
or low in the scale, whether working to keep soul 
and body together, or devoting our powers to 
advancing the Kingdom of God, we are organic 

6 



82 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

parts of a social whole, and the ideal that is 
directive for us has been shaped by our actions 
and reactions with other finite spirits. 

Already it grows clear that Personality is not 
and cannot be static. It is a moving affair — 
always, and at every stage, prophetic of more 
yet. " Selfhood, " Fichte says rightly, " is endless 
seeking to be a self." No attainment, no reach- 
ing of goals, ever exhausts the possibilities of 
Personality. Here again we have a reversal of 
the " natural" order. 

In the physical universe we seem to have a 
running-down system. There is onward move- 
ment, but only within limits. The movement is 
all one way — towards condensation and loss of 
heat. The processes are not circular. The 
radiated heat never returns and the period of 
physical life in the solar system appears limited. 
Wherever there is physical life there are limits 
to development. All activity tends to check 
further activity. Within certain limits exercise 
constructs the body, it is true, but we soon 
reach the point where the running down begins. 
The movement of the hand that raises the food 
to the mouth wears out the body, the very pro- 
cess of digestion which keeps us going also wears 
us out. After the short period is passed during 
which our activities seem to store up gains, we 



The Realization of Persons 83 

reach the watershed of life and a reverse process 
becomes apparent. Every activity checks rather 
than constructs. Every strenuous effort leaves 
us with a loss of capital force. We see that every 
burning of life's lamp uses up our limited supply 
of oil and, whether wise or foolish, we cannot go 
to them that sell and buy more. At length the 
running down is completed and there is a full 
stop. 

In the inner, or spiritual, life we find exactly 
the opposite principle to this one of checkage at 
work. Here all gains are capitalized. Every- 
thing we get helps us to get more. Every victory 
confers power for further victory. In Paul's 
great phrase, which is literally true: "We are 
more than conquerors." The things that once 
were hard duties which we did by sheer effort, 
we now do almost by second nature, somewhat 
as we wind our watches. Once we had to hold 
ourselves to the truth by main force, now truth 
is formed in the inward parts. Long ago most 
of us stopped thinking of our characters or of 
the aim at sainthood. We have discovered that 
those things take care of themselves, or rather 
are taken care of in the spiritual order. By a 
very necessity in the inner nature of things the 
gains from our deeds are conserved and builded 
into the advancing power of life. The reward of 



84 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

overcoming is a " crown of life" which simply 
means more life — life fulfilled. Those who attain 
receive "the morning star," which is the dawn- 
promise of a new day for further advance. So 
far as we can discover, the life of the true self is 
cumulative. It carries its past with it and 
gathers momentum as it goes. Still and forever 
the reach exceeds the grasp. 

It is impossible to see what end there could be 
to personality. As far as ever we can follow it 
out we discover only increasing possibilities. It 
seems like a number system, in which however 
far you have counted, you can always add one 
more number! There never could be a last 
number. There could no more be a terminal 
limit to personality. To be a person is to see 
something beyond the present attainment. If 
we were as persons, nothing but curious func- 
tions of bodies, then of course we should cease 
with the dissolution of the body, as the iri- 
descent colors vanish when the bubble bursts. 
But if rather the body is only a medium for 
giving temporal manifestation to that which is 
essentially spirit, the falling away of the body 
may be only a stage in the process, like the 
bursting of the chrysalis by the insect which was 
meant to have wings and to live on flowers. The 
fact is, personality gets no sufficient origin in 



The Realization of Persons 85 

the phenomenal world ; nothing here explains it. 
From the first it trails clouds of glory. Even the 
budding personality betrays an infinite back- 
ground and suggests an infinite foreground. 
What we really have, when the person appears, 
is the self -consciousness of the world manifest at 
a focus point — a unique expression of the eternal 
self — set free to make his individual contribution 
to the world of spiritual Being. He may sub- 
merge himself in the show-world of sense and 
time, or he may live for the eternal which is 
constantly hinted to him in the spiritual ideals 
of life. As he pursues the path of increasing 
life, he finds himself drawing upon an unseen 
source and he discovers that his life is enwrapped 
and enfolded in a limitless Life. 

We shall see, as we go on with our farther 
study, that the ideals by which the self is realized 
not only involve an organic social order, but 
carry also in them the implications of an infinite 
Self through whom and to whom we are. 



Self-Sacrifice 



"He that has lived for the lust of the minute and died, in the doing it, 
flesh without mind; 
He that has nail'd all flesh to the Cross till Self died out, in the love of 
his kind 

What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at 
last, 

Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps of a mean- 
ingless Past? 

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's anger of bees 
in their hive? — 

Peace, let it be ! for I loved him and love him forever : the dead are not 
dead, but alive." 

Tennyson's " Vastness." 



Self-Sacrifice 



The goal of personal life is realization of the 
self. Wherever there is life at all there is effort, 
strain, struggle to be. Every little creature 
which comes into the world is furnished with 
instincts that work toward guarding and fur- 
thering existence. "Thou shalt strive to be," 
is a law older than the tables of Sinai. It is 
written invisibly in the structure of the cell. On 
each higher level of life this fundamental prin- 
ciple shows higher significance, but it is nowhere 
absent. "Thou shalt become a person" is the 
unending oracle which speaks to the soul of man 
from every holy place in the universe. The 
most ancient heavens and the voice within alike 
are pressing upon the dawning self the call to 
develop a unique personality. There are few 
more awe-inspiring events than the budding of 
self-affirmation in the little child. Blindly his 
instincts have pushed him toward the mother's 
breast and have guarded his slender thread of 

8 9 



90 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

life when nobody could have saved him, if he 
had not, without knowing it, saved himself. His 
eyes have obediently followed the bright light, 
the striking color, and, by a tendency more 
primitive than will, he has found out how to 
perceive objects. Through imitation, which 
underlay all conscious acts, he has caught the 
first meanings of personality, and has won the 
little stock with which he can begin life's busi- 
ness for himself. One fine day, not announced 
beforehand, he makes his surprising debut. He 
asserts his will. " I am somebody and I am 
resolved to be more of a somebody ' ' is what he 
is trying to say. He is no longer a centre of 
instincts. He has begun to affirm himself. All 
the mysteries of self-direction and self-assertion 
have appeared in the little life. He will never 
again quite passively let the world make him as 
it wishes. He has become a factor in his own 
making. He has started out with sufficient 
stubbornness to assert and maintain his own 
uniqueness. This will to be is the very core of 
ethics, and without it life would lose its signifi- 
cant and dramatic element. 

But by itself it would be a self-destructive 
principle. Made into a universal law it would 
produce a monster — a bare, isolated individual. 
No amount of planing or shaving ever gets a 



Self-Sacrifice 91 

board so thin that it has but one side ! A board 
with only one side is an absurdity ! But that is 
no more absurd than an isolated individual who 
has solely and exclusively asserted himself, who 
has aimed at solitary self-realization. Only the 
maddest insanity could exhibit such a specimen. 
Involved in the very heart of life itself is another 
principle as fundamental as self-assertion. It 
may be called self -surrender or self-sacrifice. 
Whatever it is named, it is the altruistic atti- 
tude and endeavor. It is not a late reversal of 
nature's primary law, struggle for existence, as 
some have supposed. It is not something which 
has come in "afterwards." It is structural like 
the other principle. Without surrender and 
sacrifice nobody could be a person at all. The 
world through and through has its centripetal 
and centrifugal forces, and chaos would come if 
either force vanished. 

Those who have called self-sacrifice irrational 
or supra-rational have failed to note that bare 
self-assertion is just as irrational. No real per- 
sonal qualities could be won on either tack 
pursued alone. Without gravitation, William 
James says, the world would be "an insane 
sand-heap." Yes, and without centrifugal force 
it would be an insane undifferentiated-lump. If 
self-sacrifice is, as we are told, "glorious mad- 



92 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

ness," then certainly undeviating self-assertion 
is inglorious madness. Either path leads alike 
to annihilation. Both end alike "in the dark 
night where all cows are black. " We have come 
upon one of those deep paradoxes of life. To 
become a person one must both affirm and deny 
himself. One involves the other. They are not 
totally different things. They are diverse aspects 
of the same thing. They belong together as 
indissolubly as the two sides of the board do. 

To get we must also give, to advance we must 
surrender, to gain we must lose, to attain we 
must resign. From the nature of things life 
means choice and selection, and every positive 
choice negates all other possibilities. Every 
choice runs a line of cleavage through the entire 
universe. If I take this, I give up that. The 
young man who has just completed his education 
and is facing this rich and complex life of the 
world feels that all things are possible for him. 
He can be anything he chooses. There are a 
thousand possible careers and they are all attrac- 
tive. But some day he makes his difficult choice. 
He decides to be a specialist in Greek philology. 
This choice compels him to sacrifice the nine 
hundred and ninety-nine other possible careers. 
There is a similar inevitable conflict of selves. 
Realization by a stern necessity means limita- 



Self-Sacrifice 93 

tion. To go north limits one from going south. 
To enter the spiritual contests for an incor- 
ruptible crown limits one from being an easy 
pleasure-seeker. As of old, so to the end of time, 
it is impossible to serve both God and Mammon. 
Now in all these choices we get what we want, 
but at the same time we often, perhaps generally, 
give up what we also want. Our choice entails 
a real loss, and this hard fact, that each choice 
strips off a whole world of possibilities, has often 
figured in the pessimist's list of woes. Whether 
it shall be reckoned among the evils or the goods 
of life — as a debit or a credit in our earthly 
stock-taking — will depend on the further ques- 
tion, whether we fix our thought on what we are 
getting, or on what we are losing — on our self- 
realization or on the things which it forces us 
to drop. 

From this approach self-sacrifice makes us 
dwell on our finiteness, it compels us to note 
that we reach any goal whatever through an 
endless process of limitations, over a path strewn 
with dead possibilities. From another approach, 
as we shall see, it carries with it the implications 
of an infinite relationship. The person who 
seriously aims at any end which can be called 
good must surrender something and must reach 
beyond the bare "I" and "me." 



94 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

Nothing at all can be achieved within the 
solitary circle of the self. Such an undertaking 
is as impossible as the gymnastic feat of lifting 
oneself by the boot-straps. The life of a person 
is a bundle of relationships. He has received 
from everybody, living and dead, who by any 
possibility could open a line of communication 
or influence with him. There is undoubtedly 
something personal, private and unique in his 
selfhood. Environment does not account for 
him. But he can find nothing in himself which 
he has not received. There is another's mark on 
every good which he possesses. Nebuchad- 
nezzar's boast he may never apply to himself, 
"See this great person that I have builded." 
The self-made man is harder to find than the 
missing link. There simply cannot be such a 
' ' creature. ' ' All other lives have helped make his 
life. All other selves have helped constitute his 
self. Strip him of what he has received and he 
would perish with poverty and nakedness . There 
is no such thing as an atomic ego — existing as a 
bare and separate entity. It is as much a fiction 
of abstraction as is the atom of physics. The 
personal self is like the brain-cell, to be revealed 
only as it functions in a whole made up of beings 
like itself. The whole is the ultimate reality, 
and the individual exists only because the whole 



Self-Sacrifice 95 

does. Now in the light of this truth we must 
study self-sacrifice. 

The " isolated self" is no more real than the 
"conjunct self."* Cut apart they are both 
abstractions. Neither can be, nor be realized, 
without the other. To live for the isolated self 
would be to lose the conjunct self, but at the 
same time to lose the isolated self too! The 
complete egoist annihilates himself. It is there- 
fore not irrational to prefer the conjunct self to 
the isolated self — it is the height of rationality. f 
! We lose one self to save another self. The 
mother's sacrifice illustrates it. She is not her- 
self with her child gone. The sacrifice that saves 
the child is for her the only path by which she 
can realize the self which she wants. Here is the 
pathetic story of a little boy who was picked up 
in the water, from the burning steamer " General 
Slocum " : " My mother gave me a life-preserver, 
that's how I got saved," said the little fellow, 
whose name was Muller. " I guess she did not 

*This term, " conjunct self," is borrowed from my esteemed 
teacher, Professor George H. Palmer. 

f Schopenhauer, who takes the diametrically opposite view 
to the one I am expressing and who regards self-sacrifice as 
"unnatural" and supra-rational, says: "The natural man 
would, if forced to choose between his own destruction and that 
of the world, annihilate the whole universe merely for the sake 
of preserving himself, this drop in the ocean, a little while 
longer." 



96 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

have none herself, 'cause they can't find her." 
The patriot carries us a step farther. He finds 
his real self in a country free and united. 
Without this his isolated self is of little worth. 
He dies to the one to win the other. The martyr 
does not care for his life if it is to be cut apart 
from the truth he loves, i. e., from the ideal 
society to which through his truth he belongs. 
He dies to the one in the hope of saving the 
other. The saint has become a member of an 
invisible kingdom which is his supreme reality ; 
he dies to the existence of sense that he may 
live to his conjunct self where life is full. 

Every instance of self-sacrifice, which is calm 
and full of purpose, is of this nature. To the 
sympathetic spirit every child is in some sense 
an own child. One cannot see it lost without 
losing something of his real self. To the true 
citizen of a state every situation which affects' 
the welfare of the state makes its call upon him 
and he must decide where his duty lies. In 
every age there comes the immemorial contest 
" betwixt old systems and the word." Each one 
of us must side with truth as we see it, and in 
these choices the free soul must always have his 
taste of martyrdom. But here again he prefers 
his self plus this truth to his narrow, shrunk self 
without it. The same principle is involved in 



I 



Self-Sacrifice 97 

all genuine friendship. Love always " smites the 
chord of self, ' ' but it passes out of sight only to 
reappear in a higher kind of self. 

" So they loved, as love in twain 
Had the essence but in one; 
Two distincts, division none 
Number there in love was slain." 

Nobody can have the gains of friendship, the 
glorious gift of love, who cannot surrender. He 
who stubbornly stands guard over the " me ' ' and 
the "mine" is forever denied these supreme 
blessings. The friend, the lover, loses his iso- 
lated self and finds himself anew in a conjunct 
self, which "neither two nor one is called." 

All work demands self-sacrifice. Nothing can 
e produced which contributes to the world 
unless the worker puts himself into his product. 
He must resist all temptation to get a quick 
product. He must painfully learn from others, 
give up his capricious ideas, surrender his per- 
sonal likes, become an organ of humanity. He 
must make what the world can use; he must 
gain skill at uninteresting tasks. The successful 
worker has sacrificed half a lifetime learning how 
to do his day's work. Yes, but he has been 
winning a new self while the slow sacrifice has 
been going on. While he has been giving up he 
has been getting. Through the denial and sur- 
7 



98 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

render he has affirmed himself. He has lost his 
solitary self and found himself in the conjunct 
life into which through his labor he has poured 
himself. The search for truth exhibits this prin- 
ciple in still clearer light. The truth-seeker in 
any field cannot think anything he happens to 
like or fancy. He cannot " hold his own views. " 
He must surrender his prejudices, sacrifice his 
pet ideas and his precious theories. He must 
find out what is there, in the world beyond him. 
He must conform his view and his theories to 
that. The comfortable arm-chair thinker who 
spins his science and philosophy out of his own 
head discovers quickly how absolutely the world 
ignores him, how unreal his pretty rainbows are. 
Truth, with its permanent aspects, is never found 
that way. Every inch of advance in her realm 
is won by self -surrender and by patient sacrifice. 
Truth is found only by those who can come out 
of self and enter, at some door, into the universal 
life. But what a glorification and affirmation of 
the real self such a pursuit is ! What riches there 
are in this wide life into which the private self 
merges itself, and how it comes to its realization 
along this path of surrender! 

This principle, too, throws light upon the 
great facts of conscience and obligation — the 
most august facts which we ever meet in our 



Self-Sacrifice 99 

human experiences. Here we discover a will 
which seems other than our own, an authori- 
tative call which appears to come from beyond 
us. Deep calls unto deep. This voice of duty 
defies analysis. We cannot discover its origin 
either in the race or in the individual. All 
naturalistic explanations have broken down at 
some point when all the facts were marshalled. 
The self-conscious being always manifests as 
marked a sense of difference between Tightness 
and wrongness as between up and down. The 
form of oughtness seems as original as the 
form of space or of time. But our actual, con- 
crete conscience, which we obey or disobey, is a 
product of the organic social life of which we 
have spoken so much. Until one is consciously 
or subconsciously a part in a whole, he can 
know no call to surrender his momentary im- 
pulses for more universal ends. 

The child who, without knowing it, is catching 
by imitation the thousand little movements and 
expressions which are habitual to the members 
of his family is also becoming responsive to the 
social and moral and religious customs of the 
environment. They are, beyond his knowing, 
concretely filling his form of " oughtness." The 
conjunct self is realizing itself in a new person. 
The higher will of the whole is organizing a new 



LofC. 



ioo Social Law in the Spiritual World 

instrument for itself, and without disrupting his 
very personality the individual cannot cut him- 
self apart from the society which has educated 
him. Till he has killed out his selfhood, he 
cannot kill out the calls of the conjunct self. 

So sacred and august has the voice seemed 
that in all ages it has been clothed with divine 
sanction, and the man who obeyed or disobeyed 
felt in a deep and overwhelming sense that he 
had said " yes ' ' or " no " to God. So in fact had 
he, for we shall see that the step is short from 
this conjunct self to the infinite Companion — the 
divine Other who is nearer than our neighbor. 

All self-sacrifice, of the voluntary sort, comes 
essentially and rationally from the fact that all 
self-conscious beings are tied in together, as the 
word " obligation" suggests, and are realizing 
their lives together. It is this fact, too, that 
makes life such a dramatic and often tragic 
affair. 

We cannot live to ourselves, we cannot die to 
ourselves ; we cannot sin to ourselves, or cleanse 
our hearts from sin all to ourselves. Life cannot 
escape the principle of vicariousness which is 
woven into all its strands. The wine-press which 
is trodden alone squeezes out wine which glad- 
dens men's hearts forever, and becomes the 
precious possession of the race. The higher the 



Self-Sacrifice ioi 

person in the scale of the spiritual life the more 
insistent will be the calls to self-sacrifice; the 
more striking becomes the significance of vicari- 
ousness. 

The deepest note of the Gospel, — namely, that 
God suffers with us and for us, — is also the 
deepest fact of all life. The prophet felt the 
truth, Christ revealed it in the culmination of 
His life, and now our social ethics has come 
upon the same truth by an independent path of 
scientific study. There can be no spiritual being, 
whether he be the immature and embryonic 
saint, or the Infinite Father, who does not go 
out of his isolated selfhood to win his life in 
others, who does not share his life to gain a 
spiritual fellowship, who does not endure suffer- 
ing to produce a more universal joy. 

But before this someone has surely been 
asking: "On this basis is not self-sacrifice 
another form of self-seeking? " We always, it is 
admitted, do what we want most to do. We 
give up to get. We surrender to realize. Is not 
this selfishness on a new level? Does not this 
seeming altruism, like a Proteus, turn into a 
veritable egoism? Altruism and egoism are as 
relative as are the directions right and left. 
They mean nothing by themselves. All altruism 
is more or less egoistic; all egoism is more or 



102 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

less altruistic. We cannot tell which term to 
apply until we know what end is sought. 

Many a canonized saint has been egoistic; 
many a man whom society has condemned has 
been altruistic. In genuine self-sacrifice the aim 
centres not on the "me," but on an end which 
seems foreign to our own welfare. The deed is 
sufficient in itself, and for the moment absorbs 
the doer of it. We lose thought of self in the 
end which we seek to realize. We do not think 
of its rebound upon us. We are not remotely 
calculating the cubits which this will add to our 
self-realization. Two things fill our thought — 
what we are losing and what we are giving some- 
body else, though in all our more glorified acts 
there is little consciousness of mine and thine — 
the self and the other are one, and we are only 
aware that this is the thing to do — "how other- 
wise!" 

In every case where we obey the call of the 
whole and surrender the isolated self for the true 
self we do get satisfaction, but we did not aim 
at it. The terminus of our desire is the deed. 
We stake ourselves — to live or to die — for some 
hard thing, not to have men say "he did it," 
not to have the thrill of burning up to light the 
world — but to do the deed and to light the 
world. We do the deed because our life is 



Self-Sacrifice 103 

inseparably one with those whose lives will 
benefit by the deed, and we have no eye half 
turned toward a halo. 

But this discussion makes us aware that the 
negative word " self-sacrifice " is not a very 
appropriate term for the great positive fact 
which we are considering. It turns attention to 
the loss rather than to the gain, to the surrender 
rather than to the attainment. Consecration is 
a better word, though perhaps at first it sounds 
too exalted. It is, however, no rare and uncom- 
mon thing. It is a feature of the most ordinary 
person's life, and it rises to all degrees as we go 
up the scale of personality. 

There is some affirmation in every act of sac- 
rifice and no man can make a fine sacrifice until 
he has a true value of himself.* 

The sweeper of the city street who sweeps in 
the dark corner where no inspector comes, simply 
because it is his business to have the streets clean, 
has a touch of this consecration on him. The 

* " Every self-sacrifice is at the same time self-preservation, 
namely, preservation of the ideal self; indeed it is the proudest 
kind of self-assertion for me to sacrifice myself, for me to stake 
my life, in battling for a good which I esteem higher than my 
life."— Paulsen's "A System of Ethics," p. 389. He also points 
out the further fact that even the bad action involves sacrifice. 
" The traitor sacrifices his friend, or his reputation or his people 
for thirty pieces of silver; he, too, would rather have the thirty 
pieces of silver without the sacrifice." 



104 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

lighthouse-keeper who rows out night after night 
to the lonely rock, though he knows that for 
weeks together no ship goes by his coast, and 
who does it because he is counted on for that, is 
in the same list. 

The shoemaker in the little inland town who 
makes an honest shoe for some unknown cus- 
tomer across the world and who feels the sacred- 
ness of his work is in his humble way consecrated. 
The scientist who counts nothing too hard in his 
unwearied struggle to win one more secret from 
the unknown that he may add it to the slowly 
growing total of human knowledge is to be 
enrolled among those who are consecrated. 

The daughter who smothers all her own per- 
sonal dreams to care for an invalid mother or a 
widowed father, the reformer who spends his 
days studying the slums that he may hasten the 
day when there shall be no slums, the Christian 
teacher who counts no obstacle too difficult if so 
be he may make one more person enter into the 
real meaning of the love of Christ — all these are 
examples of consecration. 

It shines out everywhere like the stars over 
our heads and it is so common that it is often not 
noticed. But it is a fact which needs to be 
accounted for as much as these same overhead 
stars do. It has not come out of nothing. You 



Self-Sacrifice 105 

may reduce the tangible world to matter and 
motion if you will, and say over your gigantic 
dust-heap of a cosmos, "This is nothing but a 
mechanical arrangement of atoms," but what 
will you do with this fact of consecration? Men 
live all the time for something not themselves. 
It is involved in all personal life. There is no 
realization without it. 

What shall we say, then? There is but one 
answer. Love and devotion are the tremendous 
facts of life. Wherever the person is they 
appear, as does gravitation where the particles 
of matter are. They show that spite of seeming 
independence and isolation our spiritual lives are 
conjunct. We find our joy in giving as God 
does, because after all the giver and receiver are 
all one in the deeper spiritual unity, and he that 
loveth is in very fact " of God," and well on the 
way home. 



The Subconscious Life 



I know of a case where an old man of the lower classes, on his deathbed, 
was heard suddenly to recite several Greek passages in the most elegant 
Greek. As it was generally known that he understood not a word of 
Greek, this occurrence was considered miraculous, and was at once 
exploited by shrewd wags at the expense of the more credulous. Unfor- 
tunately for them, however, it was presently discovered that in his boy- 
hood he was compelled to memorize and to declaim Greek sentences, 
serving in this way as an inspiring influence to a high-born dullard. He 
had thus, it would appear, acquired a smattering of Greek phraseology in 
a purely mechanical manner, without ever understanding a word of it. 
Not until he lay at the point of death, some fifty years later, did these 
meaningless words come up again out of his memory and force them- 
selves into utterance." — "Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann." 






The Subconscious Life 

We have been finding in our previous studies 
that personal self-consciousness is a mere frag- 
ment of a larger social group which in turn is 
also a fragment of a still more inclusive whole. 
It may help us clear up our thinking if we exam- 
ine briefly how the luminous peak of our own 
consciousness rises out of a larger realm of life 
which, though below the threshold of conscious- 
ness,* plays a momentous part in the drama of 
earthly being. 

It is now a truism that our personal self is at 
every moment wider than we know and larger 
than any manifestation of itself. Our clear con- 
sciousness is always a selection from an enor- 
mously wider stream of subconscious, or undif- 

*The term, "threshold of consciousness," used here some- 
what loosely and not quite in its strict psychological usage, 
means the lowest possible degree of awareness. Any influences 
or "experiences" below the threshold would not be known in 
consciousness. Anything which rises to the degree of aware- 
ness has passed the threshold. The term "subconscious," or 
" subliminal " therefore means below the level of awareness. 

109 



no Social Law in the Spiritual World 

ferentiated, material for thought. If one thought 
occupies the window all other potential thoughts 
must stay below, or wait their turn. In fact the 
experiences of the most simple normal life of any 
individual no less than the manifestations of the 
extremely abnormal cases of "possession" and 
"double personality" alike show that the mar- 
gins of the self sweep out indefinitely beyond 
the horizon which our consciousness illumines. 

" Beneath the stream, shallow and light, of what we say we feel, 
Beneath the stream, as light, of what we think we feel, 
There flows with noiseless current, obscure and deep. 
The central stream of what we feel indeed."* 

The iceberg with its peak of blue ice shining in 
the sun carries an enormously greater bulk of 
ice submerged below the surface. Around the 
gulf stream of warm tropic water there is a 
whole ocean of cold water which has no current 
of its own. Beneath the lava which spouts into 
view through the volcano there is a molten core 
of earth which presses up from unexplored 
depths. Somewhat so the self we know is 
related to a larger life which belongs to it, is in 
some sense its own, and yet lies below the 
margin of the primary consciousness. f 

* Matthew Arnold. 

f It is impossible to put facts of the " inner life " into a dia- 
gram. But a " pictorial image " may possibly suggest the idea 
here a little better. In the figure, (a) shows the "peak" of 



The Subconscious Life 



hi 



It has well been likened to the color band of 
the spectrum. Beyond each end — the red and 
the violet — there are vibrations which give us 
no colors. At the red end the vibrations are too 
slow, at the violet end too rapid for our retina 
to turn them into color. But there they are as 
real in fact as is the most brilliant band in the 
spectrum. So too we have learned that there 
are mental phenomena beyond our conscious 
horizon as unmistakably as within this horizon, 
and without the " beyond" we should not have 
the " within." There are two ways of studying 
the phenomena of the subconscious, or sublim- 

consciousness. Around it (b) are the "dying peak" and the 
" dawning peak," i. e., the one which has just now prevailed, 
and the one which will ct 

succeed next. The thought 
of any moment is influ- 
enced by what is just 
dying out and by 
what is just 
coming in. 
This makes 
the "fringe" 
around the 
peak. Then 
(c) repre- 
sents the 

"threshold" or horizon of consciousness. Submerged below 
this line there lies {d) the vast realm of the subconscious, 
which, for all we know, borders upon the infinite Life, rises out 
of it, and may receive " incursions " from it. 




ii2 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

inal, life:* (i) Through the experiences of ordi- 
nary normal persons, and (2) through the states 
and experiences which are usually called abnor- 
mal or supernormal. We will take the normal 
states first. 

Every act of perception focuses consciousness 
on some definite object which seems to fill the 
thought, but it is easy to show that this object 
in consciousness always has its fringe or margin. 
In our field of vision there is always more than 
we know we see. Objects or circumstances 
which do not come to clear consciousness make 
their influence felt and get " a standing," though 
their presence is not acknowledged. The blueness 
of the sky, or the heavy mist of the day, is 
present in the background of our consciousness 
throughout the day, and though we may not 
once make sky or mist the subject of conversa- 
tion, or definite object of thought, it will con- 
tribute to our mood, influence our decisions and 
be a factor in all we do or think. 

There are many ways of proving that our eyes 
see more than our minds take count of. Not 
infrequently in laboratory experiments where 
the gaze has been focused upon some small 

* I shall avoid using the expression the subconscious, or 
subliminal, " self," for I do not wish to imply that the mental 
life below the threshold is a different "self" from the one 
above the threshold. 



The Subconscious Life 113 

object, in the " after-image, " which comes as the 
eyes are rested, objects appear which had not 
been noticed at all while attention was occupied 
with the central object. Crystal-gazing has 
given us much light in this interesting field. 
Most of the pictures which the gazer sees in the 
crystal ball are objects which w^ere within the 
field of vision, but escaped notice or were too 
dim to fix attention. 

An English lady, whose experiments with the 
crystal have been very successful, relates that 
one day she saw in the crystal the picture of a 
young girl who was an intimate friend of hers, 
and she observed that the girl's hair, which had 
always hung down her back, was now put up in 
young lady fashion. The next day her young 
friend reproached her for having passed her in 
the 'street without noticing her, when she par- 
ticularly wanted to be noticed because she had 
just put up her hair ! 

At another time she saw in her crystal the 
words, "The Valley of Lilies," which proved to 
be the title of a book which someone had laid 
on her table without her knowing it and too far 
distant from where she sat for her to see the 
words with her normal vision. There is nothing 
" uncanny ' ' about this crystal-gazing, and it only 
gives marked emphasis to facts which the most 

8 



ii4 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

ordinary experience gives testimony to. Every 
conversation bears witness to the presence of 
"marginal objects/' objects which are out of 
focus, and impressions which have not yet come 
to full birth in ideas. In fact the very reason 
we turn from the present object of vision to a 
new one is that the second object has already 
been felt in the margin of vision before it is 
really perceived. 

The same situation applies to all the other 
senses. A thousand noises are reaching us while 
we are listening to one particular sound. Often 
when we are listening to the conversation of one 
person, in a room full of confused talk, we catch 
the sound of our own name, pronounced amid 
the babel. Nothing else had apparently reached 
us. If, however, we were hypnotized the inter- 
esting fact would be revealed that we could 
relate much of the conversation which led up to 
the name and which our normal consciousness 
failed to follow. The sleeping mother beauti- 
fully illustrates this truth. She will sleep peace- 
fully amid the rattle of the windows, the din of 
the street and the movement of persons about 
the house. But let her child turn over or sigh 
or make any waking movement, she is at once 
aware of it. She is asleep to everything else, but 
awake to her child. But in order to distinguish 



The Subconscious Life 115 

noises she must be hearing them all. It is well 
known that sleepers wake up if any monotonous 
noise ceases, which usually goes on while they 
sleep. In dreams, words or fragments from 
unnoticed conversations often rise to the light. 
Not a little of the stuff of dreams is woven out 
of just this marginal or subconscious material, 
not before noted as ours. 

The influence of unnoticed odors has fre- 
quently been commented upon. In subtle and 
unaccountable ways they produce moods and 
bring to thought forgotten scenes. One stands 
in some old garden looking intently at a rose- 
bush and suddenly finds himself a hundred miles 
away lost in the memory of a long past experi- 
ence, because unknown to his conscious self a 
faint odor of lavender reached his sense of smell. 
At each moment, too, of our waking life we are 
recipients of innumerable touch impressions from 
the entire surface of our bodies — in fact from 
every part of their cubic contents. There is a 
feel of the clothes and shoes wherever they touch 
us. If a shoe noiselessly dropped off we should 
miss it ! 

Not seldom, again, our moods are created by 
the combined impressions of these nameless and 
unnoted touch and pressure sensations. The 
positions of our limbs are felt, and yet not felt. 



1 1 6 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

We are dimly aware that they are there, though 
we are not now noticing the crook of the knee or 
the bend of the elbow. We respond in every 
motion to the call of the semicircular canals — 
those three spirit-levels within the ear — but we 
never know that they are giving us their hints 
for position. In every change of vision we adjust 
the size of the pupil of the eye and " accommo- 
date" the lenses to suit the new object. We are 
never remotely conscious of it. We do not know 
how we do it, but it is as intelligent an act as 
any we ever perform. 

The same thing applies to all the organic 
functions. They all go on below consciousness, 
and yet they are all affected, favorably or unfa- 
vorably, by states of consciousness. They, in turn, 
give us moods and contribute much to the wild 
imagery of our dreams. The disordered organ 
which has not reported its state to your waking 
life may get its full inning and run up a high 
score as soon as consciousness leaves the field. 
Under the study of abnormal cases, we shall see 
what power consciousness has over organic 
functions. 

Passing now from sensations to more ' 'interior" 
mental phenomena we shall find the subcon- 
scious element no less in evidence, and undi- 
minished in importance. The entire process of 



The Subconscious Life 117 

memory and imagination lies below conscious- 
ness. Every image which comes into thought 
comes by a law of association. We pass from 
one topic of conversation to the next, from one 
thought to a new one by a connection which is 
deeper than consciousness. Again and again we 
find ourselves asking "how did I come to be 
thinking of this ? " It is as though some invisible 
being had carried us over from one peak of 
thought to another, and just as unaccountably 
some memory rolls out while we were drumming 
our feet on the floor, lost in abstraction. 

Here again it is the fringe about the clear idea 
of the moment which guides us along into the 
dawning thought. But this so-called "fringe" 
is never itself caught in consciousness. It is like 
the cable quivering with messages submerged 
beneath the sea. Still more interesting is the 
situation when we undertake to find a lost 
word — to drag up a forgotten name. We know 
perfectly well that the word, or the name, is 
somewhere within the boundary of what we call 
our self. But we know equally well that it is not 
in our present consciousness. We search for it. 
A curious search it is. We are hunting for some 
definite thing which we know we know, but 
which at the same time we know we do not now 
know. 



1 1 8 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

The self of narrow horizon is appealing to 
the self of wider horizon. In some submerged 
stratum of this very self of ours the name lurks 
and cannot be fished up. How do we go to work ? 
Not directly, for the harder we think by sheer 
force the less we get on. We catch some under- 
current which may carry us in. We let out as 
many floats as possible to feel for currents that 
are setting the right way. We try initial letters, 
we get the local setting by thinking where we 
met the person whose name is in question. We 
remember the page on which we have seen it 
written ; and lo ! without more ado the name is 
presented to us by a magic hardly less wonderful 
than that which piled Aladdin's palace. 

Hardly any normal mental operation reveals 
more clearly the fact that our consciousness at 
any moment is but a bubble in a larger sea than 
does this phenomenon of memory. Within a 
certain radius from the conscious centre we 
exercise a certain hazy sway as lords of the 
domain. It is territory which we feel is ours, 
though our power over it is never direct. In 
this submerged region just beyond the shores of 
our consciousness lies wreckage from every 
experience of our entire past lives. Almost any 
incident under favorable circumstances may be 
reproduced — drawn above the surface for its 



The Subconscious Life 119 

moment again in the light. But nothing comes 
up on demand. The will has no compelling 
power. It can only seize and hold what comes 
by the law of association, and the entire 
machinery of this process — if we may use such 
an unspiritual word as machinery — is in the 
subconscious. Without more than consciousness 
as it appears above the threshold we should have 
no memories. But down in the deeps below the 
threshold it seems possible that everything 
which has once come in may be preserved.* 

In the volitional realm the subconsciousness is 
even more in evidence. Most of our acts are not 
steered by consciousness. A mass of activities 
have become habitual and now require no atten- 

* From among the many good cases, I select the following 
interesting story told by Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

" A held a bond against B for several hundred dollars. When 
it came due, he searched for it, but could not find it. He told 
the facts to B, who denied having given the bond and intimated 
a fraudulent design on the part of A, who was compelled to 
submit to the loss and the charge against him. Years after- 
wards, A was bathing in Charles River, when he was seized 
with cramp and nearly drowned. On coming to his senses he 
went to his bookcase, took out a book, and from between its 
leaves took the missing bond. In the sudden picture of his 
entire life, which flashed before him as he was sinking, the act 
of putting the bond in the book, and the book in the bookcase, 
had represented itself. The reader who likes to hear the whole 
of a story may be pleased to learn that the debt was paid with 
interest." — Oliver Wendell Holmes, in "Pages from an Old 
Volume of Life," pp. 299, 300. 



1 2 o Social Law in the Spiritual World 

tion from upper consciousness. Make your 
writing completely conscious and it loses all its 
grace and easy flow. It looks like the writing 
of a child. Play on your musical instrument 
with direct self -consciousness, and the playing 
becomes ridiculous. 

Guard your self-consciousness at the social 
function, or in your public speaking, and you 
make an exhibition of awkwardness. We all 
know how hard it is to swallow a pill when we 
consciously swallow; how impossible to play 
cricket or golf if we think of our hands; how 
dangerous for the tight-rope walker if he thinks 
of his balance. All undertakings guided by 
direct consciousness are slow, inaccurate and 
exhausting. The world would never have seen 
any great work done if all human endeavor had 
required minute direction of consciousness. 

Now, we originate an action and turn it over 
to "the effortless custody" of the subconscious 
which steers it swift and sure and easy. The 
fingers know the keys, the feet know the tight- 
rope, the arms have the proper golf swing, the 
"man within" will practice courtesy and good 
manners without thinking — as we all walk 
beyond our knowing. We have gained in the 
lines of our exercise what has been well called 
the "humble accuracy of instinct," which hits 



The Subconscious Life 121 

the mark where self -direction would surely miss. 
Happy is the man who not only has won the 
skill of body by his habitual exercise, but has 
also by his choices and decision gained a moral 
dexterity of the soul so that it has become 
second nature to choose the good ! who has prac- 
ticed truth-telling until he has truth, like the 
Psalmist, "in his inward parts" — i. e., truth- 
telling and righteousness have become sub- 
conscious. 

We all pass over from the stage of unconscious- 
ness to conscious effort and finally to actions 
performed subconsciously. Many, I should say 
most, of those characteristics which used to be 
attributed to heredity are products of the 
subconscious experiences of early childhood. 
Actions, manners, traits, habits of parents are 
subconsciously imitated and the little life sets 
itself by forces which are never consciously 
analyzed. Character, conscience, courtesy, and 
most of the graces and virtues, are formed by 
subconscious processes which defy analysis. 

But while it is true that these processes defy 
analysis, it should be noted that the subcon- 
scious life is largely " formed" by concrete influ- 
ences and by definite activities. It is not some- 
thing wholly mysterious. Subconscious hand- 
writing is possible because the writer has trained 



122 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

himself by long practice and effort. Being 
trained he draws at his ease upon the fund 
which he has capitalized. His writing is no 
miracle. It is the normal product of conscious 
training. The musician cannot have unconscious 
ease and power unless he "forms" it by years 
of work. 

The ideas and illustrations which come troop- 
ing in for the orator to use have not dropped 
into him from the sky. They are the fruit of 
his life of observation and reading and medi- 
tation. He is a good orator because he has a 
rich subconscious life, but he has that because 
his diligence has created it. 

Easy manners are formed out of the practice 
of courtesy. The man who never thinks of his 
hands or of his feet or of the fit word for his lips 
has won this freedom at a great price. He has 
made himself unconsciously graceful by diligent 
effort. 

The formation of conscience is the work of a 
lifetime, but when it speaks, the voice does not 
seem our own. Rightness and wrongness and 
the sense of oughtness, are deeper than any 
human plummet can sound. But each indi- 
vidual^ concrete conscience is "formed and 
filled' ' by the social and personal experiences of 
the lifetime. 



The Subconscious Life 123 

The atmosphere of the home into which the 
infant comes, " the psychological climate " of the 
first years, the habits, traditions, manners, con- 
tagious ideas of the family group — all these 
things begin to form a conscience which will 
always bear its nurture marks. 

Every concrete choice weaves something into 
the invisible structure which lies far below the 
threshold, and in the moral crisis of that person 
the " set " of the inner life will count, though the 
actor will not remember how it was formed. 

It is a fact as old as poetry or art that the 
man of genius does not understand himself or 
know where his creative power lies. The ex- 
planation is within, not outside the man. But 
it is not to be found within his conscious self.* 

A genius always possesses a remarkable sub- 
conscious life. He is more than ordinarily acute, 
impressionable, absorbent. He feels what ordi- 
nary eyes never see, common ears never hear. 
He seizes with ease the fruits of travail of whole 
centuries. But more than that, the wall between 
the conscious self and the subconscious life is 

* " No science maintains that the whole of our personality- 
is incarnate here and now; it is beginning to surmise the con- 
trary and to suspect the existence of a larger transcendental 
individuality, with which men of genius are in touch more than 
ordinary men. We may all be partial incarnations of a larger 
self." — Oliver Lodge, Hibbert Journal, Vol. II, No. 3, p. 470. 



T24 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

extremely thin for the genius. He is a person 
with extraordinary power of appropriating the 
subconscious material. He has, as Tennyson 
well says, "truths deep-seated in his mystic 
frame." All he has is at his service, while we 
others know that we have something down there, 
if only its shell were not so tight. In his highest 
creative moments there are, too, uprushes from 
below, invasions from regions beyond the ordi- 
nary self. Lost and forgotten things lie now at 
hand for use — vestiges of the experiences of a 
whole life. It is as though the gate of selfhood 
were lifted and a flood of power swept in from 
another world. These inrushes seem to bring 
something deeper, something more universally 
and permanently worthful than are the products 
of voluntary thought. The man builds better 
than he knows, and not seldom he feels as 
though his words, or his music, or his model 
were given to him by another. All we need say 
now, is that the self that thinks is the highly 
active centre of a much wider life which crowds 
its contributions upon the thinking self, and he 
is right in feeling that he receives what he uses, 
for there is no explanation for such persons unless 
we recognize that they have a spiritual universe 
for their environment and with which they 
co-operate. 



The Subconscious Life 125 

Dreams furnish us an open window into the 
subconscious. Since man began to dream he has 
believed that the dream stuff, or at least much 
of it, came from beyond himself. Now he got 
messages from distant friends, now from dead 
ancestors, and now from his god. 

Even yet many among us hold that genuine 
communications come in dreams and that God 
speaks to His beloved in sleep. It is at least cer- 
tain that dreams bring to us much which in 
waking life had no part with our conscious 
experience. Almost every dream bears witness 
to a vast subliminal realm which though ours is 
hardly "us" at least the ownership is a loose 
one. Many of our dreams take their rise from 
bodily stimuli which in waking life are ignored 
and which are too faint to wake us from sleep. 
The sensation may come from a faint noise in 
the room, or from the condition of some internal 
organ, or from a cramped position in bed, or, as 
frequently happens, from the retinal light of the 
eye caused by the circulation of the blood and 
noticeable whenever the lid is tightly closed. 

Given the simple sense-fact, the mind has to 
account for it, and quick as a flash it invents its 
pictorial story to fill out and justify the bare 
sense-fact which has been thrust in upon it. In 
the train of hallucinations which make up the 



12 6 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

imagery of dreams almost any fact of earthly 
experience from birth to the moment of the 
dream may figure. Events which never reached 
normal consciousness and other events which 
have faded out and lost all color of reality come 
trooping in, vivid with warmth and color. 

One illustration will suffice. An aged friend 
of mine knew a young woman of twenty who 
again and again during her life had dreams of 
being out for a drive. The horses came to a 
certain dangerous hill with a stream and a bridge 
at the foot. On the way down the hill something 
broke. The horses ran away, dashed down the 
steep pitch into the bridge and capsized the 
carriage with serious disaster to those within. 
Always the same course of events came and the 
dream repeated itself until it fairly haunted the 
young lady. 

One day when on a visit to a distant State 
she went for a drive. The carriage came to a 
great hill when suddenly the young woman gave 
a shriek, for she saw before her in full detail all 
the scenery of her dream. The hill was descended 
without catastrophe. When the tale was told at 
the house where she was visiting, an elderly rela- 
tive related this interesting history : " When you 
were a little child hardly a year and a half old 
your mother brought you here on a visit, and 



The Subconscious Life 127 

while you were driving, the horses ran away 
down that hill and capsized the carriage against 
that bridge. " 

Here was the source of the material of the 
dream, which, however, was never repeated 
afterwards. In a less dramatic way, our dreams 
any night bring up memorial vestiges which we 
did not remotely guess were within the circuit 
of our self, and furthermore there is good ground 
for believing that many of our inexplicable 
moods are the outcome of painful, though unre- 
membered, dreams.* 

The study of the subconscious or subliminal 
in abnormal states is so enormously large an 
undertaking that I can only attempt to present 
a few well-established facts which make it im- 
possible to doubt that the self in any person is 
immeasurably wider, deeper, higher than con- 
sciousness, which is the thesis of this lecture. 

Hypnotism has proved a most fruitful means 
of exploring the subliminal realm. Hypnosis is 
an artificially induced, sleep-like condition of 
mind and body during which the subject is char- 

* " From the soul's subterranean depth upborne, 
As from an infinitely distant land, 

Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey 
A melancholy into all our day." 

Matthew Arnold, " The Buried Life." 



128 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

acterized by a marvelous suggestibility. * During 
the hypnotic trance the consciousness no longer 
steers action, and generally after the trance is 
passed everything which happened during it is 
submerged, but not lost ; nor is the past life by 
any means lost during trance. Rather it is 
found. Tell a hypnotized man that he is Plato 
and immediately he personifies the philosopher. 
All he knows of Plato will come to his service 
and he will play his part as well as his previous 
training will allow. 

In a most astonishing way a person gets con- 
trol of his organic processes through hypnotism. 
Tell him that ammonia is perfume, he will inhale 
it with genuine pleasure. Put a postage stamp 
on his back and tell him it is a fly-blister, and 
the blister appears on the skin. Suggest that 
his nose is bleeding and blood may come from it. 
Tell him that he will not feel the amputation of 
his arm and he does not feel it. This power of 
suggestion over bodily conditions has most inter- 
esting bearings on so-called " faith cure" and 
"mind cure" experiences. The fact is that, 
though we know too little how to set these 
deeper curative forces at work, under the sway 
of faith, under the influence of expectation, 
almost any physical change may occur. 

* There is no scientific ground for calling hypnosis an abnor- 
mal state. It is abnormal merely in the popular sense. 



The Subconscious Life 129 

The "stigmata," i. e., the nail-prints on the 
hands and feet of St. Francis are no longer 
referred to miracle. Similar " marks ' ' have been 
produced under the eyes of skilled observers and 
they may appear upon any sensitive subject 
under hypnotism when he is told that they will 
appear. In ways undreamed by our ancestors 
we are learning that every function of the body 
has its degree of consciousness, that down below 
this red end of our spectrum of consciousness 
something goes on which is a part of the self — 
that incursions may occur from above down and 
from below up. 

Hypnotism has revealed the fact that the 
subliminal self is hyper-acute and perceives or 
becomes aware of much which would be entirely 
beyond the range of the ordinary consciousness. 
Hypnotized subjects will read lips, hear uncon- 
scious whispers, even see things reflected in the 
cornea of a person's eye. They will read with 
their eyes apparently shut. They interpret 
changes of breathing in the operator and will 
feel the moving of a hand separated from them 
by a screen. 

One naturally asks, is not the subconscious 
equally hyper-acute when the upper conscious- 
ness is awake? We cannot absolutely prove 
that it is, but there is much to show that we 



130 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

always feel more than we know we feel. Hypno- 
tism proves that this is true while that state lasts. 

The remarkable phenomena of post-hypnotic 
suggestion indicate how strangely incursions 
may occur from one side the threshold to the 
other. Tell the subject in trance that on coming 
to consciousness he will not be able to see a 
certain person who is in the room. The waking 
state returns. He is perfectly himself except 
that he cannot see this one particular person. 
Generally he cannot feel him or hear him. 

Try the same experiment with a bright red 
cross. Tell the hypnotic subject that the card on 
which the cross is made will look perfectly white 
to him for an hour after he is restored to con- 
sciousness. He sees then nothing on the card, but 
after he has been gazing at it and then looks at 
a white surface he says he sees a green cross on 
it, which is of course "a negative after-image." 
If he is told to raise an umbrella, ten minutes 
after trance is over, and hold it above his head 
in the parlor, he will rise without knowing why 
and get his umbrella and put it up. 

Hypnotism has revealed the fact that we have 
an astonishing time-sense within us. A subject 
told during the hypnotic state to make a cross 
with a pencil 20,180 minutes from the time the 
order was given, did it at the precise time. The 



The Subconscious Life 131 

impulse to perform the suggestion in all these 
cases of post-hypnotic experiment rushes up 
from below and invades the normal waking 
consciousness. 

Again and again the suggestions in hypnosis 
have had a lasting moral effect upon the person's 
life, and some of the most stubborn cases of 
opium habit and alcoholism have been cured by 
hypnotic suggestion. 

The disease to which we give the generic name 
of hysteria has given us startling revelations of 
the subterranean depths of consciousness.* The 
phenomena which are induced by suggestion 
occur spontaneously in hysteria. It is always 
marked by gaps in the normal consciousness — its 
field has narrowed. Frequently whole sections 
of the upper consciousness are submerged and 
seem lost. 

Hypnotism will generally recover these sub- 
merged sections. The consciousness which ap- 
pears in hypnotism knows just this lost section. 
It is, however, often discovered without hypno- 
tism. Take the hysteric who has an arm in 
which feeling is lost. Put the arm through a 
screen where the eyes cannot see it. No amount 

* In hysteria the range of consciousness is greatly narrowed, 
i. e., much which is normally above the threshold has fallen 
below. By hypnotism it is possible to " tap " the realm below 
normal consciousness and to draw upon it. 



132 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

of pinching or pricking will be felt. But put a 
pencil in the hand, frequently the hand assumes 
a writing attitude. If it is started on a word, 
the hand will finish the word of its own accord. 
If now someone gently whispers questions in 
the hysteric's ear, while a third person keeps 
her attention fixed, the pencil-hand will answer 
these questions. Meantime the person herself is 
entirely unconscious that this is going on. Not 
infrequently the lower personality assumes a 
name, leads a life almost detached from the 
primary self. 

These cases of double personality sometimes 
come on spontaneously and strangely confuse 
the self -identity.* We are, however, gradually 
learning how to treat such diseases of person- 
ality, and the time will come when hysteria may 
be conquered. It has played an enormous role 
in history. Possession by the devil, witchcraft, 
unnumbered forms of contagious mania and 
delusion were types of hysteria. 

On its lower side it is surely a disease, and it 
generally works toward disorganization of per- 
sonality, but even so it reveals the fact that the 
territory of the self is deeper and wider than 
common experience had suspected or than scien- 

* One of the most noted cases of this sort is that of Ansel 
Bourne. 



The Subconscious Life 133 

tific formulas had allowed. The hysteric, who 
seems only a shattered wreck, often manifests 
almost unbelievable power and acuteness of per- 
ception and control over organic processes. 

Not seldom, too, such persons seem able to 
penetrate the thoughts of others and to possess 
extra-normal faculties of receiving information. 
It is too soon to draw final conclusions from the 
cases so far studied, but this much is certain, 
the theory that every personal life is insulated 
and windowless is well shaken. 

There may be vast subterranean connections 
which bind us together in ways scarcely dreamed 
of. Every type of subconscious activity gives 
hints that no circle can be drawn to mark the 
limits and boundaries of the self. Even the 
most ordinary of us, no less than the genius, 
knows what it is to have truths and conclusions 
and insights "shot up," as it were, "from the 
hidden depths below," as though the tides of a 
deeper sea were crowding into our inlet. 

"Our definite ideas," wrote Oliver Wendell 
Holmes many years ago, "are stepping-stones; 
how we get from one to the other we do not 
know: something carries us ; we [i. e., our con- 
scious selves] do not take the step. A creating 
and informing spirit, which is with us, and not of 
us, is recognized everywhere in real and in storied 



134 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

life. ... It comes to the least of us as a voice 
that will be heard; it tells us what we must 
believe; it frames our sentences; it lends a 
sudden gleam of sense or eloquence to the dullest 
of us all ; we wonder at ourselves, or rather not 
at ourselves, but at this divine visitor, who 
chooses our brain [?] as his dwelling-place and 
invests our naked thought with the purple of 
the kings of speech and song. ' ' * 

Enough has been said to emphasize the point 
to which this chapter is devoted, namely, that 
around every centre of conscious life, which is the 
core of personality, there is a fringe of unknown 
width. 

" There is actually and literally, " says William 
James, "more life in our total soul than we at 
any time are aware of." " The conscious person 
is continuous with a wider self." He goes still 
further and asserts that there is "a more of the 
same quality [with the person] which is operative 
in the universe outside him and which he can 
keep in touch with." 

We have seen how the genius draws upon a 
domain of thought-material, lying outside the 
realm of his consciousness. We have seen the 
"faith curist" using powers which transcend his 

* Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Mechanism of Thought and 
Morals." 



The Subconscious Life 135 

knowledge and explanation. Even ordinary 
sleep seems to put us where powers not our own 
repair the waste and perform a ministry of 
restoration and renewing. 

May there not be in this inner portal to our 
personality some real shekinah where we may 
meet with that Divine Companion, that More 
of Life, in whom we live? Do such " higher 
energies filter in " ? Do any mortals hear tidings 
from across the border which unify their spir- 
itual lives and construct their being and enable 
them to speak to their age with an authority 
beyond themselves? 



The Testimony of Mysticism 



"In a world of life they live, 
By sensible impressions not enthralled; 
But by their quickening impulses made more prompt 
To hold fit converse with the spiritual world." 

Wordsworth's "Prelude," B. XIV. 

"Ask me not, for I may not speak of it ; 
I saw it." 

Tennyson's "Holy GraiL" 



The Testimony of Mysticism 

All personal religion has its inward side. It 
cannot be reduced to a system or be understood 
by an observer who notes only expressions and 
performances. The visitor from Mars who 
should stumble into a Friends' Meeting or into 
a great cathedral service would be hopelessly 
puzzled. He would see no utility in the per- 
formance and (were he non-religious) he could 
not remotely guess what was going on. 

If we were able to look in upon the brain of 
our friend with magnifying eyes, we should see 
marvelous molecular motions going on among 
the cells. Now at this centre and now at that 
we should see the cells grow agitated as though 
a furious storm were raging. We might ulti- 
mately learn to describe these movements and 
to catalogue these activities, as we now do with 
the cosmic movements of the heavenly bodies. 

But how completely all this time we should 
be missing the real situation. What we from the 

*39 



1 40 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

outside have been calling molecular movements, 
from the inside for him are thoughts and emo- 
tions and will-purposes. Where we saw a storm 
of activities in a brain-centre, he was overcoming 
a temptation or was thrilled with a rapture of 
aspiration. The outside view for him was 
nothing; the inside was all. We reckon ill 
always when we leave out the testimony of 
consciousness. 

The mystic finds religion, not in the institu- 
tions which history describes, not in the creeds 
which have been formulated to satisfy intellec- 
tual demands, not in organized forms through 
which men give expression to their religious 
activities — he finds the heart of religion in his 
own consciousness of God. Primarily he believes 
in God for the same reason that he believes in 
himself. 

There are always men and women in the world 
who have this first-hand, irrefragable certainty 
of God — persons who know that the frontier of 
their consciousness lies close along the shining 
table-lands which God Himself illumines. They 
never much trouble themselves over arguments 
to prove God's existence. Their souls have dis- 
covered Him and they as little want proof as the 
plain man of the street wants proof that he sees 
a house. 



The Testimony of Mysticism 141 

The mystic who has this internal evidence is 
a person whose wall between the conscious self 
and the vast subliminal region is extremely thin. 
That which for most persons stays beyond the 
threshold surges in and makes its reality felt for 
him and exercises a sway over the whole life. 
His religion thus does not crystallize. It keeps 
grounded in actual inward experience, with its 
life-blood ever flowing. Some degree of this 
experience, which flowers up in the great mystic, 
is probably present in us all. 

Every human being has a double aspect. He 
has his sharply defined life above the threshold 
and a vague, haunting life below it. Even the 
most prosaic of us are haunted by a beyond. 
But most of us find it fairly easy to substitute 
bloodless symbols for these deeper felt realities, 
just as we do our thinking with words and give 
up visualizing the objects for which the words 
stand. 

The mystic, on the contrary, resists this 
tendency, but he is able to do it simply because 
his impressions of the divine intercourse are so 
vivid — the springs that bubble within are so 
unmistakable to him. Incursions from beyond 
the known limits of the self come surging in. 
By some deeper principle of perception than that 
which gives us our sense-world these souls dis- 



142 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

cover that their lives are in God. They feel that 
their being is but a cell in a larger whole of being. 
They are but inlets which open on the infinite 
sea and they feel the shoreless tides beat in. 
They are focus-points of the Infinite Spirit. 

Any person who has these moments of con- 
sciousness in which he feels his relationship to 
the Infinite is so far a mystic. It is probable 
that these experiences are more common than we 
are accustomed to suppose. There are few of us 
certainly who are not made aware at times of the 
fact that our lives are interlaced in an infinite 
whole, that our reality is rooted in a deeper 
reality and that a common Life circulates 
through us and quickens us. 

It is just this feeling which Professor Everett 
so well illustrates:* " We ask the leaf, are you 
complete in yourself? and the leaf answers, No, 
my life is in the branches. We ask the branch, 
and the branch answers, No, my life is in the 
trunk. We ask the trunk, and it answers, No, 
my life is in the root. We ask the root, and it 
answers, No, my life is in the trunk and the 
branches and the leaves. Keep the branches 
stripped of leaves and I shall die. So it is with 
the great tree of being. Nothing is completely 
and merely individual." 

* Everett, " Immortality and other Essays," p. 63. 



The Testimony of Mysticism 143 

I quote an interesting case, found in Star- 
buck's collection, of a person who describes his 
consciousness of God: " Something in myself 
made me feel myself a part of something bigger 
than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one 
with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, every- 
thing in Nature. I exulted in the mere fact of 
existence, of being a part of it all — the drizzling 
rain, the shadow of the clouds, the tree-trunks, 
and so on. I knew so well the satisfaction of 
losing self in a perception of supreme power and 
love, that I was unhappy because the perception 
was not constant." 

" I am sure that there is a common spirit that 
plays within us, and that is the Spirit of God. 
Whoever feels not the warm gale and gentle 
ventilation of this Spirit, I dare not say he lives; 
for truly without this to me there is not heat 
under the tropic, nor any light though I dwell 
in the body of the sun."* 

Walt Whitman has given a penetrating ac- 
count of this deeper consciousness: "There is 
apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of 
every superior human identity, a wondrous 
something that realizes without argument, fre- 
quently without what is called education (though 
I think it the goal and apex of all education 

* Sir Thomas Browne, " Religio Medici." 



144 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute 
balance, in time and space, of the whole of this 
multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incred- 
ible make-believe and general unsettledness, we 
call the world; a soul-sight of the divine clue and 
unseen thread which holds the whole congeries 
of things, all history and time, and all events, 
however trivial, however momentous, like a 
leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. Of such 
soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere 
optimism explains only the surface."* 

Jacob Boehme's experience is often quoted as 
typical: "In one quarter of an hour I saw and 
knew more than if I had been many years 
together at an university. For I saw and knew 
the being of all things, the Byss and the Abyss 
and the Eternal generation of the Holy 
Trinity." 

St. Theresa has a similar experience: " It was 
granted me to perceive in one instant how all 
things are seen and contained in God." The 
best illustration of this mystical consciousness 
is the experience of an old man in Monod's " Six 
Meditations on the Christian Ministry": "The 
Holy Spirit is not merely making me a visit ; it 
is no mere dazzling apparition which may from 

*" Specimen Days and Collects" p. 174 — quoted in James, 
" Varieties of Religious Experience" p. 396. 



The Testimony of Mysticism 145 

one moment to another spread its wings and 
leave me in my night ; it is a permanent habita- 
tion. He can depart only if he takes me with 
him. More than that; he is not other than 
myself; he is one with me. It is not a juxta- 
position, it is a penetration, a profound modi- 
fication of my nature, a new manner of my 
being." * 

This is a characteristic mystic experience. 
Those who have enjoyed something similar to 
it will easily believe in its reality and those who 
have not, are no more justified in denying its 
reality than the blind man is in denying reality 
to the stars which he cannot see. 

The significant thing which the mystic has to 
give us is his testimony that he has an immediate 
consciousness of God. He comes to the restless, 
the fore-wandered, the absent from home, and 
calmly states the mighty fact that he feels per- 
fectly at home with God. He has found the 
Holy Grail. But how has he found it ? Has he 
learned something which he can communicate 
to other souls? No, mystical states are not 
knowledge-states, but feeling-states. The mystic 
has an inward perception, but he cannot put it 
into the common language of thought. It is 
something personal and private and as inde- 

* Quoted by James, op. cit., p. 419. 



146 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

scribable as love is. He may tell another what 
steps he took to arrive at it. He may lay down 
some principles to test the experience by when 
it comes, but he cannot transmit his own inward 
assurance or tell adequately what has come to 
pass within him. 

We have developed no language for the experi- 
ences of the heart, as we have for experiences of 
external sense. Our intercommunications com- 
pelled us to invent a vocabulary for the latter. 
The struggle for existence in a society of fellows 
has not forced us yet to get a common language 
for heart-experiences, and therefore these experi- 
ences have kept fluid. But Professor Royce is 
right in insisting that the mystics are the most 
thoroughgoing empiricists. They base every- 
thing in experience; only from the nature of 
the case it is a form of experience which must 
to a large extent remain private and personal. 

Of all persons the sound mystic has the clearest 
sense of unity in the universe. The scientist pre- 
supposes an ultimate unity in the physical world 
— a single force, law or principle which gets 
diverse manifestation in all the events and forms 
which he studies. The moralist knows that there 
can be no system of ethics unless he starts with 
a unity of the race, and a basal bond of love in 
the very structure of society. The artist realizes 



The Testimony of Mysticism 147 

that his creation will be beautiful, if it is beauti- 
ful at all, because it shall succeed in manifesting 
the universal principle of beauty, which may be 
discovered alike in 

" The frailest leaf, the mossy bark, 
The acorn's cup, the raindrop's arc, 
The swinging spider's silver line, 
The ruby of the drop of wine." * 

But the mystic goes farther. In his highest 
moments he enters an eternal now, in which are 
past and future, near and far, the visible and 
the unseen — all one in a living unity of which 
he himself is an undivided, but a no less real 
part and parcel. Let us hear a mystic's parable 
of this unity: " These rivers, O gentle youth, 
flow eastward toward the sunrise and westward 
toward the sunset. From ocean to ocean they 
flow, and become (again) mere ocean. And as 
they there know not that they are this or that 
river, so verily, O gentle youth, all these crea- 
tures know not when they issue from the One 
Being that they issue from the One. What that 
hidden thing is, of whose essence is all the world, 
that is the Reality, that is the Soul, that art 
thou." 

" ' Bring me a fruit from that tree.' ' Here is 
it, venerable Sir!' 'Cut it open.' 'It is cut 
open, venerable Sir.' 'What seest thou in it?' 

* Emerson, " Ode to Beauty." 



148 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

1 Very small seeds, venerable Sir. ' ' Cut open one 
of them. ' ' It is cut open, venerable Sir. ' ' What 
seest thou in it?' 'Nothing, venerable Sir.' 
Then spake he: That hidden thing which thou 
seest not, O gentle youth, from that hidden 
thing verily has this mighty tree grown ! Believe, 
O gentle youth, what that hidden thing is, of 
whose essence is all the world — that is the 
Reality, that is the Soul, that art thou." 

" About a dying man sit his relatives and ask: 
'Dost thou know me? Dost thou know me?' 
His lips no longer answer because his life is now 
in the highest life and this comment is made: 
'What this fine thing is of whose essence is all 
the world, that is the Reality, that is Soul, that 
art thou. " ' * The key to the unity of the 
universe is the unity of consciousness and to 
some rare souls it is granted to feel their 
oneness with the spiritual whole — to catch "the 
deep pulsations of the world," to know that 
their "tiny spark of being" is of the one uni- 
versal light. 

Now there are two very diverse types of 
mystical attitude which come out of this positive 
testimony of consciousness to the soul's relation 
to God. I shall call the two classes respectively 

* From Lanman's " Chandogya," VI, 2-15, quoted in 
Royce's " World and the Individual," Vol. I, pp. 164, 165. 



The Testimony of Mysticism 149 

negation mystics and affirmation mystics, though 
these words are used merely for purposes of 
description. 

1 . The sense of the divine presence will natu- 
rally work very different results upon different 
persons. If one discovers that he is a partaker 
of the divine Life, what shall he do next ? Why, 
answers the mystic of our first class, he shall 
make it his goal to become absorbed in God — 
swallowed up in the Godhead. 

Where can God be found? Not in our world 
of sense anywhere, answers this mystic. Every 
possible object in our world is a mere finite 
appearance. It may be as huge as the sun or 
even the milky way, or as minute as the dust- 
speck in the sunbeam; it makes no difference. 
It is a form of finitude. It is, in contrast to the 
Absolute, an illusion, a thing of unreality. It 
cannot show God or take you to Him. 

No better is the situation when you can fix 
upon some event of history or some deed of a 
person in his social relations. The event is a 
mere finite fact. Cut off and treated by itself, 
it is not a true reality. God cannot be found 
in it. The same thing applies to inner states. 
They are no better than finite activities. Every 
state of consciousness is sadly finite. It always 
seeks a beyond. Consciousness is the symbol of 



1 50 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

restlessness. It is like the flight of the bird 
which has not found its nest. When the soul is 
perfectly at home in God all thought will be 
quenched, all consciousness will cease. 

''Believe not," cries one of these mystics, 
"those prattlers who boast that they know God. 
Who knows Him — is silent." He proceeds 
therefore by process of negation. Everything 
finite must be transcended. He must slough off 
not only the rags of his own righteousness, but 
the last vestige of his finitude. Union with God, 
absorption in His Being, so that "self" and 
" other" are unknown is the goal of his search. 

" Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee 
There was — and then no more of Thee and Me." 

He is seeking for an immediate experience 
which shall fulfil every finite purpose and leave 
nothing to be sought or desired — a now that 
shall hint of no beyond. One sees that this 
mystic is asking for something which cannot be 
granted, or at least for something which could 
not be known if it were attained. The Absolute 
who is postulated as precisely the negation of 
all finiteness turns out to be for us mortals only 
an absolute zero — a limitless sum-total of nega- 
tion.* 

* Two passages from two great mystical writers, one in the 
sixth and the other in the fourteenth century, will further illus- 
trate the type, which I have called "negation mysticism." 



The Testimony of Mysticism 151 

Eckhart glories in calling his Absolute, "the 
nameless Nothing." Our surrender of finiteness 
brings us to an abstract absolute which lacks 
all qualities and differentiation. The mystic 
realizes the dilemma, but glories in it. His last 
great yearning is that he may lose his finite, 
illusory personality, and be at home in the deeps 
of Being where no one says "I" or "mine." 

He rejoices in states of consciousness which 
approach a blank — when human thought is 
still — for he feels that he is now nearer truth 
and reality. He assumes that whatever comes 
from beyond consciousness must necessarily 
come from God, and thus the nearer he gets to 
the sleep of self the higher his openings. Again 

" For the beholding of the hidden things of God, shalt thou 
forsake sense and the things of flesh and all that the senses can 
apprehend, and that reason of her own powers can bring forth, 
and all things created and uncreated that reason is able to com- 
prehend and know, and shalt take thy stand upon an utter 
abandonment of thyself and as knowing none of the aforesaid 
things, and enter into union with Him who is, and is above all 
existence and all knowledge.'' Dionysius, "Epistle to Timothy." 

" The Perfect is none of the things which are in part. The 
things which are in part can be known, apprehended and 
expressed; but the Perfect cannot be known, apprehended 
or expressed by any creature as a creature. 

Therefore we do not give a name to the Perfect, for it is 
none of these [i. e., nameable or knowable things]. The crea- 
ture as creature cannot know nor apprehend it, name nor con- 
ceive it." 

" Theologia Germanica," Winkworth's Translation, pp. 2, 3. 



152 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

and again he has mistaken the confused noises of 
his own subliminal self for messages of unspeak- 
able worth, and he has given us many lessons on 
the value of some common standard and test of 
truth beyond the mere "it seems so to me," 
spoken with an emphasis of infallibility. 

One sees at once the logical and practical 
outcome of the mysticism of negation. It ends 
in contraction and confusion or at least would 
so end if the person were faithful to his principle. 
" It is," as one of our rare American teachers has 
said, "as if the bud, knowing that its life is in 
the life of the parent tree, should seek to become 
one with the tree by withering and shrinking, 
and letting its life ebb back into the common 
life. Seeing it we should not say, Behold how 
this bud has become one with the tree; we 
should say, The bud is dead." 

Then, too, it has been the tendency of this 
type of mysticism to encourage men to live for 
the rare moment of ecstasy and beatific vision, 
to sacrifice the chance of winning spiritual 
victory for the hope of receiving an ineffable 
illumination which would quench all further 
search or desire. 

2. We turn now to the affirmation mystics. 
They do not make vision the end of life, but 
rather the beginning. They are bent on having 



The Testimony of Mysticism 



i53 



an immediate, first-hand sense of God — but not 
just for the joy of having it. More important 
than vision is obedience to the vision. There are 
battles to fight and victories to win. God's 
Kingdom is to be advanced. Error is to be 
attacked and truth to be established. Those 
who see God must gird for service. Those who 
would have a closer view of the divine must 
seek it in a life of love and sacrifice. 

Instead of seeking the Absolute by negating 
the finite, the mystic of this class finds the 
revelation of God in the finite. Nothing now 
can be unimportant. There is more in the least 
event than the ordinary eye sees. Everywhere 
in the world there is stuff to be transmuted into 
divine material. Every situation may be turned 
into an occasion for winning a nearer view of 
God. The most stubborn fact which fronts one 
in the path may be made a revelation of divine 
glory, for to this mystic every finite fact may 
become an open window into the divine. 

It is a primary fact for him that he partakes 
of God, that his personal life has come out of the 
life of God and that he is never beyond the 
reach of God who is his source. But his true 
being is to be wrought out in the world where he 
can know only finite and imperfect things. His 
mission on earth is to be a fellow worker with 



1 54 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

God — contributing in a normal daily life his 
human powers to the divine Spirit who works 
in him and about him, bringing to reality a 
kingdom of God. 

His life with its plainly visible tasks is always 
like the palimpsest which bears in underlying 
writing a sacred text. He is always more than 
any finite task declares, and yet he accepts this 
task because he has discovered that only through 
the finite is the Infinite to be found. His mysti- 
cal insight gives him a unity which does not lie 
beyond the transitory and temporal, but which 
includes them and gives them their reality. The 
slenderest human task becomes glorious because 
God is in it. The simplest act of duty is good 
because it makes the Infinite God more real. 
The slightest deed of pure love is a holy thing 
because God shines through it and is revealed 
by it. 

It is because beauty is a unity that any beau- 
tiful object whatever may suffice to show it and 
any object that does show it has an opening into 
the infinite. It is because God is a complete 
unity that any being who partakes of Him may 
in measure manifest Him. The whole purpose 
of the one who holds this view is to make his 
life the best possible organ of God. 

He too, like our other mystic, seeks union with 



The Testimony of Mysticism 155 

God, but not through loss of personality. The 
eye serves the body not by extinguishing itself 
but by increasing its power of discrimination; 
so too the soul is ever more one with the Lord 
of life as it identifies itself with Him and lets 
His being expand its human powers. 

Dante knew that he was rising to a higher 
heaven by the richer smile on Beatrice's face, so 
too progress toward union with God is to be 
known by the increased enrichment of all the 
powers of our personality. Instead of losing 
consciousness we become through it more than 
ever aware of the deep underswell of the Infinite 
on whose bosom we rest. Instead of quenching 
desire our hearts burn to explore farther the 
divine Life which invites us on. Instead of 
losing our will we approach that true freedom 
where we will to do His will. 

That which is still beyond experience is so 
infinite that one's humble victories only make 
one modest. He dares to say " I have found the 
living God," but he adds at once: " I have not 
yet laid hold of that for which He has laid hold 
of me." " I press on for the prize. " To become 
one with God in a conscious union is the goal. 
To know that our being has been taken up and 
made an organic part of His very self, because 
He wills and because we will it, is the end of true 
mysticism. 



156 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

The "I" and the " thou " are lost only as they 
are always lost in love. They are lost to be 
found again enriched. The soul comes home 
bringing to God that which His own love has 
made possible. 

"Who is there?" asked the Lord of the saint 
who knocked at the gate of Paradise, as the 
story runs in the mystical books. "It is I," 
answered the saint. But the gate did not open. 
Again the trembling saint drew near and 
knocked. " Who is there ? ' ' came the voice from 
within. "It is thou," replies the saint, grown 
wiser, and immediately the celestial gate swung 
open ! 

The prayer of the affirmation mystic will be: 

" Leave me not, God, until — nay, until when? 

Not till I am with thee, one heart, one mind ; 
Not till thy life is light in me, and then 
Leaving is left behind." 

George Macdonald. 



The Inner Light 



"Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise 
From outward things, whate'er you may believe. 
There is an inmost centre in us all, 
Where truth abides in fulness: and around, 
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
This perfect, clear perception — which is truth, 
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh 
Binds it and makes all error: and, to KNOW, 
Rather consists in opening out a way 
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, 
Than in effecting entry for a light 
Supposed to be without." 

Browning's "Paracelsus," Book I. 



The Inner Light 

Mysticism has been for the most part sporadic. 
It has found an exponent now here, now there, 
but it has shown little tendency toward organ- 
izing and it has manifested small desire to propa- 
gate itself. There have been types of mystical 
religion which have persisted for long periods 
and which have spread over wide areas, but in 
all centuries such mystical religion has spread 
itself by a sort of spiritual contagion rather 
than by system and organization. 

It has broken forth where the Spirit listed, 
and its history is mainly the story of the saintly 
lives through which it has appeared. The 
Quaker movement, which had its rise in the 
English Commonwealth, is an exception. It 
furnishes some material for studying a " mystical 
group" and it supplies us with an opportunity 
of discovering a test and authority even for 
mystical insights.* No person can ever hope to 
gain an adequate idea of the religious movement 

*See chapter on " Test of Spiritual Guidance." 
159 



160 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

which has been called by the name of Quakerism 
until he has discovered what is meant by the 
" Inner Light." It is the root principle of an 
important historic faith, and it deserves a careful 
examination. 

The term ''Inner Light" is older than Qua- 
kerism, and the idea which is thus named was 
not new when George Fox began to preach it. 
But this idea received a meaning and an 
emphasis from the Quakers which make it their 
own peculiar principle and their distinct contri- 
bution to religious thought. 

It is no easy task to penetrate its meaning, 
first, because it has been used in a loose way 
with little or no attempt at definition, and sec- 
ondly, because a religious phrase which has long 
been current never means the same thing to 
those who use it at second hand that it did to 
those who reached it at first hand by a profound 
spiritual discovery. In one case it is the mystery 
of the living flower ; in the other it is the pressed 
specimen in the herbarium with a cold Latin 
label under it. 

The Inner Light as a doctrine or as a philo- 
sophical principle is one thing ; it may be, and 
doubtless is, quite a different thing as an experi- 
ence in one's own life. Instead of speculating 
about what the term might mean, we shall 



The Inner Light 161 

endeavor to get as near as we can to the actual 
experiences of those persons who first discovered 
the truth and made it the heart of their message. 
Their spiritual states, even though somewhat 
chaotic, are worth volumes of commentary from 
men who can give us only fine-drawn theories of 
what this Inner Light ought to have been. 

The fundamentally significant thing which 
stands out in early Quakerism was the conviction 
which these founders of it felt, that they had 
actually discovered the living God and that He 
was in them. They all have one thing to say — 
" I have experienced God." 

Quakerism was, as we are sometimes told, a 
new social experiment. It was, too, a new 
attempt to organize a spiritual Christian fellow- 
ship like that which existed in the first century. 
But it was first of all the proclamation of an 
experience. The movement came to birth, and 
received its original power, through persons who 
were no less profoundly conscious of a divine 
presence than they were of a world in space, 
impinging on their sense. 

The reader will turn in vain to any other body 
of literature for a more insistent testimony to 
the fact that God is found within than is given 
in the pamphlets and journals which the founders 
of Quakerism left behind. Others have analyzed 



1 62 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

this type of experience more keenly and have 
described it with finer insight, but it has nowhere 
else received such voluminous reiteration, nor, 
we must add, such uncompromising application 
in practical life. 

The most intimate and personal account of 
this inward experience is given by Isaac Pening- 
ton in his description of what occurred to him 
while attending a meeting at Swannington in 
1654. "I felt the presence and power of the 
Most High. . . . Yea, I did not only feel 
words and demonstrations from without, but I 
felt the dead quickened, the seed raised, inso- 
much that my heart said, This is He, there is 
no other : this is He whom I have waited for and 
sought after from my childhood.' . . . But 
some may desire to know what I have at last 
met with? I answer I have met with the Seed. 
Understand that word and thou wilt be satisfied 
and inquire no further. / have met with my God; 
I have met with my Saviour. ... I have felt 
the healings drop into my soul from under His 
wings. I have met with the true knowledge, the 
knowledge of life." * 

Robert Barclay has an impressive passage 
which bears solid testimony to a similar experi- 
ence : "I myself am a true witness who came to 

* Works of Isaac Penington (1861), Vol. I, pp. 37, 38. 



The Inner Light 163 

receive and bear witness to the truth by being 
secretly reached by this life, for when I came into 
the silent assemblies of God's people, I felt a 
secret power among them which touched my 
heart, and as I gave way unto it, I found the 
evil weakening in me and the good raised up." 

He further says that as they sit together in 
"an inward quietness and retiredness of mind, 
the witness of God arises in the heart and the 
Light of Christ shines." * 

It is not easy to find any single passage in 
George Fox's " Journal " which adequately de- 
scribes his own personal experience, because his 
conviction of the Divine Presence rested not so 
much upon some one passing vision, or a rap- 
turous moment of contact, as upon the continu- 
ous sense of the Divine Life enfolding his own, 
and it is rather implied everywhere than 
described anywhere. 

He was all his life subject to incursions of 
some larger Life from beyond the margins of his 
own personal consciousness. His long search for 
inward comfort, which filled three years of his 
life — from his twenty-first to his twenty-fourth 
year — finally terminated in an experience that 
" made his heart leap for joy" and, as he himself 

* Quoted, with some omissions, from the "Apology," Bar- 
clay's works (1831), Vol. II, pp. 355 and 357. 



y 



164 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

says, made him "know experimentally" that 
God was at work upon him. 

"I heard a voice," he says, "which said, 
1 There is One, even Christ Jesus, that can speak 
to thy condition.'" 

" I now had fellowship alone with Christ, who 
had the key and opened the door of Life and 
Light to me." 

" Inward life sprang up in me." 

" I saw by that Light and Spirit which was 
before the Scriptures were given forth." 

"I saw the love of God and was filled with 
admiration at the infinitude of it." 

" I was wrapped up in the love of God." 

"My living faith was raised and I saw that 
all was done by Christ, the Life." 

"Through the immediate opening of the 
Invisible Spirit I saw the blood of the New 
Covenant, how it came into the heart." 

" As I was walking in the fields, the Lord said 
unto me, Thy name is written in the Lamb's 
Book of Life." 

" I saw [the things that were opened to me] in 
the Light of the Lord Jesus Christ and by His 
immediate Spirit and power, as did the holy men 
of God." 

"As I walked toward the jail [in Coventry], 
the word of the Lord came to me saying, ' My 



The Inner Light 165 

love was always to thee and thou art in my 
love.' I was ravished with a sense of the love 
of God." * 

These passages give only a very feeble impres- 
sion of the profound conviction which possessed 
these three men that they were in direct com- 
munication with the Source of life and light. 
From their own personal experience they leaped 
at once to wide conclusions. With tireless re- 
iteration they announced their discovery as a 
universal truth — that every human life partakes 
of God. 

Their bulky volumes were not written to give 
adequate description of their own illumination, 
but to declare to all men the mighty fact of the 
Divine Presence and to help as many persons as 
possible to realize the direct communion which 
they themselves enjoyed. The first point to 
emphasize is this, that the founders of Quakerism 
were mastered by the conviction that they had 
discovered God in their own souls and that they 
were dealing directly with Him. 

Their conviction rested in the first instance 
upon personal experience. A life, a light, an 
influence, a power surged up within them out 

* These passages are quoted, with slight verbal changes not 
affecting the meaning, from pp. 11-47 passim of the Journal 
(eighth London edition). 



166 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

of the deep. They felt the tides of a larger sea 
flowing in their souls. They were strangely 
aware of a heightened life. They became con- 
scious of truths and principles which they had 
never known before. The boundaries of the self 
were widened by an energy from within. 

Without much critical analysis they bounded 
to the conclusion that the infinite ocean of 
Divine Life had sent its tides into their narrow 
inlets, that this new power and illumination was 
the Eternal Christ come again to human con- 
sciousness. Much more important than this 
uncritical conviction was the actual, observable 
fact that this inward experience of theirs unified 
their lives, and produced verifiable results in 
character and action. 

Barclay's testimony, already quoted, is sig- 
nificant and is confirmed by many other testi- 
monies equally trustworthy: " As I gave way to 
this power, / felt the evil in me weakened and the 
good raised up." 

From being a melancholy, dreamy, solitary 
seeker, George Fox became a man of apostolic 
boldness, and possessed of more than ordinary 
insight and power of leadership. He saw what 
to do and he did it without any halting. 

He was, as William Penn says, "a match for 
every occasion," because he met the social and 



The Inner Light 167 

moral situations of his complicated epoch with 
a principle which almost invariably carried light 
and order into them. There was an unerring 
directness of aim in his attitude toward moral 
and spiritual issues. He spoke with the assur- 
ance of one who saw. 

He felt himself illuminated from within and 
his life gave solid verification to the reality of 
his experience. The sentence already quoted 
from his own experience puts the fact concisely : 
"I felt inward life spring up within me." 

Primarily, then, the belief in an " Inner Light ' ' 
had its ground and foundation in personal experi- 
ence, and we must either suppose that the thou- 
sands of primitive Friends who claimed a similar 
experience were recipients of a genuine reality, 
or we must suppose that they were infected by 
a contagious enthusiasm which these powerful 
leaders inspired. 

We shall now pass from accounts of personal 
experience to statements of the theory, or the 
doctrine, of the Inner Light. One might say that 
every early Quaker writing is like a palimpsest. 
Beneath every word which was written this idea 
of the Inner Light also lies written. It is the 
key to every peculiarity in Quakerism. What 
was the Inner Light ? * The simplest answer is : 

* It should be said that the early Friends did not minimize 
the importance of the Scriptures, or of the historical Christ and 



168 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

The Inner Light is the doctrine that there is 
something Divine, " something of God," in the 
human soul. 

Five words are used indiscriminately to name 
this Divine something: "The Light," "The 
Seed," "Christ within," "The Spirit," "That of 
God in you." This Divine Seed is in every 
person good or bad. Here is Barclay's way of 
saying it : "As the capacity of a man or woman 
is not only in the child, but even in the very 
embryo, even so Jesus Christ himself, Christ 
within, is in every man's and woman's heart, as 
a little incorruptible seed . " * 

Again: "We understand this seed to be a 
real spiritual substance ." f It is "a holy sub- 
stantial seed which many times lies in man's 
heart as a naked grain in the stony ground." % 

Barclay is very particular to have it under- 
stood chat this "seed" is not something which 

His work for human redemption. The Christ who enlightened 
their souls was, they believed, the risen and ever-living Christ — 
the same Person who healed the sick in Galilee and preached 
the gospel to the poor under the Syrian sky, and who died for 
our sakes outside the gate of Jerusalem. One of the great 
fruits of the Incarnation and Passion, according to their view, 
was the permanent presence of Christ among men in an inward 
and spiritual manner, bringing to effect within what His out- 
ward life had made possible. 

* Barclay, "Apology" (1831), p. 177. 

fOp. cit., p. 139. 

J Op. cit., p. 140. 



The Inner Light 169 

man has as man, but that it is a gratuitous 
impartation from God — it is a gift of free Grace 
to every man. The child, however, does bring 
this with him, and so does actually " trail clouds 
of glory ; " he does bring with him from God a 
Divine soul-centre. But this "seed" may lie 
hidden and unregarded, like a jewel in the dust. 

It follows secondly as a corollary of this prin- 
ciple that direct communications are possible 
from God to man. In other words, the Inner 
Light is a principle of revelation — it becomes 
possible for man to have "openings of truth/' 
Almost every Quaker biography furnishes in- 
stances of such " openings." Fox says emphati- 
cally, " I have had a word from the Lord as the 
prophets and apostles had" (Vol. I, 127). 

Quaker ministry is supposed to be the utter- 
ance of communications that are given by the 
Spirit. This Light within is also held to be an 
illumination which makes the path of duty plain 
through the conscience. 

There is still a third aspect to the doctrine of 
the Inner Light. It is used, perhaps most fre- 
quently, to indicate the truth that whatever is 
spiritual must be within the realm of personal 
experience, that is to say, the ground of re- 
ligion is in the individual's own heart and not 
somewhere outside him. 



1 70 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

In this sense the Inner Light means that 
religious truth is capable of self -demonstration. 
"I turned them," says George Fox, "to the 
Spirit in themselves (a measure of which was 
given to every one of them) that they might 
know God and Christ and the Scriptures aright ' ' 

(Vol. I, p. 411). 

"I was commanded to turn people to the 
inward Light that they might know their salva- 
tion" (Vol. I, p. 36). Men had always been 
looking for a criterion, or test, or seat of author- 
ity outside themselves. The Quaker fulfils the 
reformation idea that Christianity is to be spir- 
itually apprehended by each man for himself; 
nothing is to come between the individual soul and 
God. 

Sin is a fact in consciousness; not a doc- 
trine which logic establishes from Adam's sin. 
God's love and mercy, His free grace and for- 
giveness, are real not because they are declared 
in Scripture and in creeds, but because they 

ARE ETERNAL FACTS OF THE DlVINE NATURE, 

which any human soul may experience. 

Salvation from sin is not to be held as a com- 
forting formula; it is to be witnessed as an 
actual experience. "The Light," says Fox, "is 
that which reaches the witness of God in your- 
self" (Vol. I, p. 343). As Paul would put it, 



The Inner Light 171 

"the Spirit beareth witness with our spirits that 
we are children of God" (Rom. viii. 16), or in 
the language of John: "He that belie veth on 
the Son of God hath the witness in himself" 
(I John v. 10). 

In a word, the soul itself possesses a ground 
of certitude in spiritual matters, and it sees what 
is essential to its life with the same directness 
as the mathematician sees his axioms. These 
are the three ways in which the primitive 
Quakers use the term Inner Light : As a Divine 
Life resident in the soul ; as a source of guidance 
and illumination, and as a ground of spiritual 
certitude. 

What shall we say of their view, judged in the 
light of more adequate psychological knowledge ? 

This third aspect of the doctrine — the self- 
demonstration of spiritual experience — is essen- 
tially right. It is in harmony with the pro- 
foundest philosophical movement of the modern 
world. It has been settled for all time that the 
criterion of truth is to be found in the nature of 
consciousness itself — not somewhere else. 

That I am I, is the clearest of all facts, but 
nobody could prove it to me, if I lacked the 
testimony of consciousness. I know that I have 
found freedom from the sense of sin, joy in union 
with the Infinite Spirit, peace through forgive- 



172 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

ness only because / know it, because it is wit- 
nessed within, not because some man in sacred 
garb has announced it, or because I have read 
in a book that such an experience might be mine. 

No truth rests on the basis of actual certainty 
until it has the seal of the soul's " I know. " The 
final test of everything in religion is the test of 
experience. Luther made this principle funda- 
mental in salvation. Salvation springs out of the 
souVs faith, and is known within. 

But he made very slight use of his great 
principle. The Quaker universalized it. Every- 
thing in religion is to be verified in personal 
experience. Even heaven is not held as a 
dogma. " I was in the paradise of God." 

" I was wrapped up in the love of God." 

"The Seed is heir of endless life." 

"They that inherit the Seed, inherit sub- 
stance." One sees at once in these positive 
sayings of Fox that he bases everything upon the 
marvelous riches of the actual life upon which 
he has entered. He finds the ground of all his 
hopes and the substance of all his expectations 
in an actual experience which he possesses. 

This position is impregnable and it is the sign 
in which present-day Christianity is to conquer. 

The discussion of the test of guidance and of 
"openings," i. e., the criterion of special re vela- 



The Inner Light 173 

tion, which is the second aspect of the doctrine, 
must be postponed, for it will require a whole 
chapter. 

The first aspect of the Inner Light — that there 
is something of God in every human life — is not 
so easily settled. Theologically, as against Cal- 
vinism, the Quaker was assuredly right. .His 
position is unmistakably well founded in Scrip- 
ture teaching, and there is a solid mass of 
support for it in the writings of the "Fathers." 

But does psychology give any ground for such 
a view? Is the doctrine founded in the nature 
of things? Both yes and no. There is some- 
thing of God in every human life. As Fox was 
so fond of saying, there is something in man 
which reveals his sin to him. To be conscious 
of fmiteness implies that consciousness has an 
infinite aspect which transcends the finiteness of 
which it is aware. 

Thou wouldst not seek God, says Pascal, if 
thou hadst not found Him. Every analysis of 
personality discovers the fact that God and man 
are inherently bound up together. Probe 
deep enough into any self and you come upon 
God. 

The Quaker felt this truth profoundly. His 
inner sense was sure and sound and right. But 
the Quaker formulation of the doctrine has been 



1 74 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

none too clear and has exposed the entire idea 
to damaging criticism. 

Barclay asserts : " Friends believe not this Seed 
or Light to be any part of man's nature, or any- 
thing that properly or essentially is of man. " * It is 
something entirely foreign to man and unrelated 
to his nature, as a man. 

" It subsists," he says again, in the" Apology " 
"in the hearts of wicked men, even while they 
are in their wickedness ... it lies in man's 
heart like naked grain in stony ground, "f 

Barclay treats it exactly as Des Cartes treats 
" innate ideas," as something injected into the 
soul. J Man himself has one origin, the "Seed" 
another. It is not only foreign in its origin; it 
forever remains foreign. It is never so united 
to the self that there is an actual unity. Man 
remains, to the end, dual. It is a human man 
plus a divine Seed or Light. Everything spiritual 
which comes from him, comes rather through him, 
as a passive instrument. 

This view is thoroughly unspiritual and con- 
trary to all the known facts of psychology. It 
continues the ancient heresy of the sharply 

*Barclay, " Universal Love." 

f Barclay, " Apology" p. 140. 

J The entire "Apology" is written under the influence of 
Des Cartes' philosophy, and that means that it is based upon a 
woefully imperfect psychology. 



The Inner Light 175 

dual nature. It leaves an unbridged and un- 
bridgeable gulf between the divine and the 
human. There is no basis for a unifying person- 
ality which binds into one organic and vital 
whole the divine and the human, making a new 
spiritual creation. 

The view we are discussing never gets beyond 
an arbitrary and mechanical union of two op- 
posed and essentially unrelated things. Human 
nature still remains unspiritualized and only 
capable of receiving into itself irruptions of a 
Nature forever foreign to its own nature, and, 
on this basis, God would remain forever unknow- 
able to human consciousness except by miracle. 

This formulation has, too, had a desolating 
effect upon the ministry of the people who have 
held it. Nothing, in this view, has " unction," 
which does not come from beyond the margin of 
the person himself. He is to be a mere passive 
channel. Nothing spiritual can come from him. 
It has encouraged the ecstatic state, and it has 
discouraged strenuous preparation of life, with- 
out which no adequate ministry ever comes. The 
idea that God and man are not so related that the 
man himself is spiritualized is the false formula- 
tion of the Inner Light, and wherever it has pre- 
vailed confusion and weakness have gone with it. 

This view would, too, destroy the ground of 



176 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

certitude and would leave no test of guidance, 
for trie personal self which is the seat of con- 
sciousness remains foreign and unrelated to the 
truth which comes through it. 

The true Quaker principle strikes much deeper 
and to discover it we must go back of such 
faulty formulations to primitive experience. 
Here are the facts : Men found God in their own 
lives. They became aware that finite and infinite 
were not sundered, but were known in the same 
consciousness. The true view, the proper for- 
mulation must hold that God is the inward 
principle and ground of the personal life — the 
indwelling life and light of the soul, permeating 
all the activities. Man's spiritual nature is 
rooted and grounded in the Divine Life. 

To become spiritual is to become a divine- 
human person — to be a person in whom the 
human nature and the Divine Nature have be- 
come organic and vital. The truth which comes 
will then be no injected revelation, no foreign 
irruption, but the genuine fruit and output of a 
personal life which unites in itself the finite and 
the infinite in one ever-expanding personality. 

The Inner Light, the true Seed, is no foreign 
substance added to an undivine human life. It is 
neither human, nor Divine. It is the actuals 
>^inner self formed by the union of a Divine andvy 
\^l human element in a single, undivided life. / 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 



"Where men are enlightened with the true light, they . . . renounce 
all desire and choice, and commit and commend themselves and all things 
to the Eternal Goodness. Nevertheless, there remaineth in them a desire 
to go forward and get nearer to the Eternal Goodness ; that is, to come to 
a clearer knowledge, and warmer love, and more comfortable assurance 
and perfect obedience and subjection; so that every enlightened man 
could say : 'I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness, what his own hand ^S 

" Theologica Gertnanica " 



T is to a man. 1 " 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 

xx 

This is a bothersome question. It must either 
be let alone, or faced squarely and hunted down 
into its deepest hiding-places. The timid an- 
swers are insufficient, such as, "it is an infallible 
Book," or "it is an infallible Church," or "it is 
the infallible Spirit." The trouble with these 
answers is, they always raise a new question. 

If the Bible is infallible, who is the unerring 
interpreter of it? There are many organized 
churches ; which one is infallible and how do we 
know that its conclusions are invariably right? 
If the Spirit of God is the true Guide, through 
whom does He manifest Himself infallibly? 
Isaac Penington says (Works, Vol. I, p. 67): 
"The Light of God's Spirit is a certain and 
infallible rule, and the eye that sees it is a 
certain eye." That would make any individual 
who had a "revelation," infallible and certain. 

On any one of these three grounds suggested 
above, an individual becomes in the last resort 

179 



1 80 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

the seat of authority. It puts the ultimate 
authority in the man who interprets the Scrip- 
tures, or in the person who is head of the 
Church, or in the individual who claims a revela- 
tion from the Spirit. How am I to know the 
will of the Spirit? When an " opening" comes 
to me, how can I test it? 

Among the many ideas, which appear before 
*~ (the footlights of my consciousness Jwhat special 
mark is there upon those that nave a Divine 
origin which distinguishes them from those that 
have a " native" origin, i. e., that rise out of 
my own impulses ? In the last resort am I not 
myself the final standard? — " What I declare to 
be from the Spirit is the truth." 

Does not the doctrine of the Inner Light lead 
^to this excessive individualism and make each 
person a full tiaraed Pope? Does the Quaker 
furnish us with any practical test under which 
the doctrine of immediate guidance can work 
safely ? 

We have already seen that in the deep and 
intimate matters which concern the soul's per- 
^sonal condition there can be no outside authority. 
The only demonstration here is the demonstra- 
tion of the Spirit. No external "sign" can take 
the place of inward conviction. 'The only proof 
that the pure in heart see God is — to see Him.) 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 181 

The poor woman in the Mother Goose rhyme 
who needed the wagging of her little dog's tail 
to assure her of her own personal identity — " If 
I be I, he will wag his little tail" — she was 
hopelessly floundering. So would any mortal be 
who did not know what he knew or who could 
not feel what he felt or who could not see what 
he saw ! So long as we are dealing with a private 
and personal experience the soul's testimony is 
final. No one can go back of these " returns ' ' ! 

But the moment we pass to matters which 
touch other lives, the moment a man's " intima- 
tions" have consequences which affect wide 
human interests, we demand some standard by 
which to test his openings. He may" say with 
Isaac Penington that "the inward eye is cer- 
tain," but we demand evidence that the eye is 
free from blur or squint. For George Fox the 
-practical test was the urgency of the prompting. 
If an intimation was lively, vivid, and com- 
pelling, that was its sufficient guarantee. Any 
idea or impression which could be traced to no 
origin within his own consciousness was for that 
reason trusted. It could not be accounted for by 
human thought, therefore it came from another 
and higher source. 

It must be confessed that his intimations 
generally led him right, though not always (as 



1 82 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

witness the Lichfield episode). But by no citing 
of examples can the urgency of the intimation 
be established as a safe criterion. For every 
instance where it has worked there are ten where 
it has proved unsafe. We are, in these days, 
only too familiar with the urgency of -fixed ideas, 
in minds otherwise perfectly sane. And these 
ideas almost always seem to come from beyond 
the threshold of normal consciousness.) 

Who would say that the man who enjoys the 
conviction of infallibility is to have the right of 
way with his unwelcome opinions ! We demand 
something more than his "It feels so to me." * 

* There are doubtless many persons whose inner ' ' openings ' ' 
are uniformly safe and trustworthy. By purity of heart, strict 
obedience, and freedom from prejudice their hearts have become 
in an unusual degree "stainless mirrors" for Divine truth. 
Like the eye of the trained artist for form, or like the ear of the 
skilled musician for harmony or like the expert in any field, 
they have become / possessors of an insight which is more sure 
than the judgment of the man who can marshal his ready 
proofs and " reasons " for his conclusions. Such a person feels 
no need of external tests and he hardly understands why ques- 
tions on these matters are ever raised. They would not be 
raised if all men were spiritual geniuses! If it were possible to 
eliminate private twists, personal warpings, individual preju- 
dices and local color, the need for tests would decrease! 

St. Augustine, in his " Confessions" B. VI, Chap. 13, says 
that his mother, Monica, had a certain inward taste by which 
she could distinguish that which came from God to her and 
that which came from herself. " She said she could discern, by 
a certain indescribable savor, which she could not explain in 
words, a difference between God's revelation and her soul's 
own dreams." 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 183 

Robert Barclay offers a negative test: what- 
ever is contrary to the Scriptures may be justly 
rejected as false. " Whatsoever any one, pre- 
tending to the Spirit, does contrary to the 
Scriptures may be accounted and reckoned a 
delusion of the devil" ("Apology," Prop. Ill, 
p. 86). 

This will do as a sort of rough hedge to fence 
off extreme errors and to shut out impulses 
which tend toward plain immorality. But it 
gives no ready way to mark off spiritual illumi- 
nation from "the light of common day," and a 
man's claim would indeed be hopeless if he 
found it impossible to cite Scripture for it ! 

Barclay's test is of course on the right track. 
He sees that nothing comes from God which does 
not fit the great moral instincts and revelations 
of the race, and we may well be sure that where 
the voice of God speaks, the call will be to work 
•out what ought to be, as inspired men have pro- 
claimed it. 

In the experience of the real prophets like 
Fox, Penington, Barclay and Grellet, to whom 
the openings come with such unmistakable assur- 
ance and who were religious geniuses, gifted with 
an extraordinary sensitiveness of soul, the prob- 
lem of a test was not a very serious one. The 
Spirit was its own sufficient witness. 



1 84 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

They did not work out, nor has any of their 
successors worked out, the answer to the ques- 
tion : Where is the seat of authority in a working, 
active, Christian body? 

The same remark can with truth be made of 
the founders of the Apostolic Church and of the 
New Testament writers. They never give an 
easy, ready answer to the question, " How may 
I know that this doctrine is sound?" "Do the 
will of Christ and you shall know the doctrine ' ' 
is the only answer. "Obey the Inner Light," 
say the pillar Quakers. But how is a poor, 
unapostolic soul, who is no pillar, or genius, to 
know that he is doing Christ's will, that his 
Light comes from a heavenly source? 
^This the Quaker apostles do not make clear, 
^md it is just here that the weak spot has always 
appeared. The answer to the hard problem is 
often almost within hail through the early 
writings. They all knew that they had a safe 
principle, though they did not find it easy in 
their thousands of solidly printed pages to tell 
the wayfaring man precisely what it was. There 
are, however, some good clues which point the 
way to a solution which we shall now undertake 
to develop. 

All spiritual teachers have pointed out in one 
way or another that the surest test of Divine 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 185 

guidance is to be sought in _life_-re.sults. The 
fruit of the Spirit will always be some permanent 
spiritual product, such as "love, joy, peace, en- 
durance, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, 
self-control." 

We must look not at the origin of an intima- 
tion for its justification. We shall ask rather 
how it will further life and tend to construct a 
permanent character. 

It is no sufficient proof that an " opening" is 
of Divine origin because it happens to come from 
we know not where, from beyond the shadowy 
margin of our consciousness.* The Divine is not 
synonymous with the mysterious and inex- 
plicable. Let us not repeat the blunder of con- 
signing God to the " gaps ' ' which experience fails 
to bridge. 

We must test every " opening" to see if it 
functions toward a spiritual life. The question 
will be, not where did it come from, but will it 
unify and construct the life, will it lead to a 
/richer personality and a more trustworthy and 
f reliable character? Does it function toward the 
power of an endless life and produce fitness for 
such a life? This is to be the mark and brand 
of every spiritual illumination. 

* Schopenhauer says : ' ' Truths which we do not remember to 
have learned are regarded as innate." 



1 86 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

No opening, no guidance, no voice shall be 
called divine which stands apart by itself and 
ends in itself. It must contribute to spiritual 
growth. It must make more evident that God is 
actively present and vitally dynamic in this par- 
ticular human life. The best proof that the 
seed which one plants is an acorn is that it 
grows into an oak. 

The only test of some seeds is an examination 
of their life product in the developed form. This 
principle must always be applied to any claim 
to spiritual guidance. // the thing manifested is 
of God it will tend to construct a unified spiritual 
life which will better show the divine nature in 
the world. 

It can be no isolated spectacle, but the orderly 
expansion of divine "seed" into spiritual fruit, 
which remains even when the special burst of 
Light has vanished. Life gains are permanent — 
sporadic impulses are temporary, like meteor 
trails. The goal of all divine prompting is the 
formation of spiritual character and the produc- 
tion of a life which is inwardly strong and sound, 
so that the law of the spirit of the life shows itself 
to be of the divine order. 

This, one may say, is not a very ready test. 
It would require a prophet every time to so 
forecast the future as to know what the effect 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 187 

and outcome of each special " leading" would 
prove to be. The great artist knows that his 
creation will have a permanent place among the 
art treasures of the world because he sees that 
he has contributed something to the eternal 
revelation of beauty. 

But the ordinary painter exhibits his picture 
only to take it down after a few weeks and lay 
it away in his heap of rejected canvases. He 
could not tell whether it was great or not until 
the people came and looked at it. It could not 
stand that test of greatness. There is a sense of 
beauty in other men before which the picture 
went down. 

Now the ordinary man — a class which is very 
inclusive — cannot easily tell whether what comes 
to him is from himself or from beyond. He feels 
a " leading," but he cannot tell whether it will 
permanently construct a spiritual self or mislead 
him, whether it will unify life or possibly unsettle 
things, as has often happened in human experi- 
ence. 

There is no little supernatural click within, 
which marks off his divine leadings from his 
own promptings. He must test it by the spiritual* 
life in other men. 

"How shall I know," asks William Penn, 
"that a man does not obtrude his own sense 



1 88 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

upon us as the infallible Spirit?" And his 
answer is : " By the same Spirit. " 

The spirit in one man must be tested by the 
spirit in many men. The individual must read 
his inward state in the light of the social spiritual 
group. He is not, and he cannot be, an inde- 
pendent organ of God. He can have part in the 
divine life at all only as he is one person in a 
spiritually organized community. 

He must therefore learn to know God's will 
not merely in private inward bubblings, but by 
genuinely sharing in a wider spiritual order 
through which God is showing Himself. 

To realize this more adequately we must study 
for a few moments the bearings of social psy- 
chology. There are unmistakable indications 
that no self is totally insulated from other 
persons, however tight in his own compartment 
each one seems to be. 

I shall pass over the great mass of testimony 
which points to a kind of intercommunication 
which may be called telepathy. We cannot yet 
say that telepathic communication is an estab- 
lished fact, though there certainly is a large 
collection of well-observed phenomena which 
cannot at present be explained on any other 
ground. 

It is possible that we are in the early stages 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 189 

of a nascent function which is prophetic of a 
crowning race of men, who eye to eye shall look 
on knowledge, of a society of mutually perfect 
mind-readers ; but all this is too vague and airy 
for our solid purpose. 

We must not stray into the problematic, or 
build on any unsubstantial perhaps, however 
emphatically psychical research points to a solid 
ground under this more or less unillumined 
region.* 

It has long been recognized that under some 
dominating leader, or under the spell of a great 
idea, or through the fusing of a common emo- 
tion, a group, or a crowd, or even an entire 
people often become almost a unity. The 
Crusades give the most striking exhibition of 
this fact. The Crusades were the act of the 
total consciousness of Christian Europe. No 
individual understood just why he went on a 
crusade. He could not analyze the rational 
ground of the movement, because he was only 
one conscious cell in an organic group. 

A mild and gentle man goes to see a football 

* Personally 1 believe that the evidence for some kind of 
communication between persons at a distance — a communica- 
tion which does not employ the ordinary sense machinery — is 
trustworthy. Those who care to pursue the subject farther 
will find a mass of incidents in Myers' ' ' Human Personality 
and its Survival after Death." 



£. 



190 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

game. He expects to be a quiet spectator, and 
so he is for a time. But suddenly a goal is made 
and the tension breaks and everybody on his side 
of the field goes wild with enthusiasm. Hats are 
in the air, a universal shout arises and personal 
consciousness is swallowed up in group con- 
sciousness, and without realizing what he is 
doing the mild-mannered man is shouting like 
an untutored Indian. 

The orator in the mass meeting, the evangelist 
in the revival has, when the audience is at white 
heat, no longer individuals before him, but a 
social group which has fused into a unit, and 
personal consciousness no longer directs or 
inhibits. Very often such a group will do what 
no single individual would think of doing, if left 
alone. 

As soon as we analyze at all our daily life we 
shall discover that a great number of our actions 
are due to the fact that we are organic parts of 
a group. Why do we eat with forks instead of 
with fingers? Why do we wear black top-hats 
instead of turbans? Why do we organize sum- 
mer schools instead of cannibal expeditions? 
Why do we sit on chairs rather than on the 
floor? Why do we shake hands when we meet 
rather than salaam? And so on with a thou- 
sand whys. We belong to a group and the 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 191 

spirit of the group penetrates and possesses us. 
The will and custom of the group is in large 
measure our will and our custom. 

We imitate both consciously and uncon- 
sciously, and when we are uncertain about any act 
whatever we ask in one way or another how it will 
fit into the life of the society to which we belong. 

All truth of every sort is put to a social test. 
I conclude that I have seen an hallucination 
because where I thought I saw a solid object 
my three companions saw nothing at all. I am 
convinced that my pet scientific hypothesis 
must be given up, because my co-laborers in 
the same field declare that it does not square 
with facts. My conviction on any subject 
deepens enormously whenever I find another 
man alive with the same conviction. 

Now, as we have seen, there are times when 
an entire group sees as one man, when a spirit 
deeper than an individual's consciousness sweeps 
through the mass and fuses it into a total which 
is not just the sum of the parts. 

In the cases above, the kindling spark seemed 
to come from without. Some objective stimu- 
lus — the sepulcher of Christ, the football goal, 
the orator's voice, the evangelist's emotion — 
gave the suggestion that fused the many selves 
into an organic self which acted as a whole. 



192 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

But may not lives be unified from within? 
Do groups of men and women ever feel, when 
together, a deeper life and a clearer perception 
of truth than are reached by any one individual 
of them alone? Coleridge once suggested that 
all living things might be but diverse harps 
which are swept by one spiritual breath : 

" What if all animated nature 
Be but organic harps diversely framed, 
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps, 
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, 
At once the soul of each and God of all?"* 

The meetings of the Friends furnish weighty 
testimony that at least in highly developed and 
spiritually responsive groups there is an actual 
heightening of inward power and a gathered 
sense of truth through union, while on rare 
occasions there has been plain manifestation 
that a unifying and directing Spirit may make 
all who are present aware that they no longer 
live unto themselves, but have their being in a 
common central Life. 

The Friends ground their conception and 
practice of public worship on this truth, which 
experience verifies. Rarely, if ever, on those 
occasions, where the inner Spirit fuses the body 
of worshipers into one whole, does any jarring 
utterance find voice. 

* Coleridge, " JEolian Harp.'* 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 193 

When the prayer or message comes, it comes 
as the voice of the meeting, and every listener 
hears the truth proclaimed in his own tongue. 
Deep calls unto deep. He who would rise to 
utter some private, self -conceived or irrelevant 
word, some vagary of his own mind, would be at 
once recognized as out of the spirit, and would 
manifest the patent fact that, though in the 
group, he was not of it. 

In these times of high social communion, 
which unfortunately are all too rare, there is a 
most delicate sense of truth attained and the 
spirit of the group can with almost unerring 
accuracy test the value of the " opening" which 
finds utterance. 

Whittier has described this feature of spiritual 
worship in numerous poems, and he is in modern 
times the finest interpreter of the inner meaning 
of Quakerism. 

11 1 find it well to come 
For deeper rest to this still room, 
For here the habit of the soul 
Feels less the outer world's control; 
The strength of mutual purpose pleads 
More earnestly our common needs; 
And from the silence multiplied 
By these still forms on either side, 
The world that time and sense have known 
Falls off and leaves us God alone. 



13 



194 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

Not on one favored forehead fell 
Of old the fire-tongued miracle, 
But flamed o'er all the thronging host 
The baptism of the Holy Ghost; 
Heart answers heart: in one desire 
The blending lines of prayer aspire; 
1 Where in my name meet two or three,' 
Our Lord hath said ' I there will be.' * 

So sometimes comes to soul and sense 
The feeling which is evidence 
That very near about us lies 
The realm of spiritual mysteries, 
The sphere of the supernal powers 
Impinges on this world of ours. 

So to the calmly gathered thought 
The innermost of truth is taught, "f 

One more quotation from the multitude of 
passages, which makes selection hard, must 
suffice : 

" Lowly before the Unseen Presence knelt 
Each waiting heart, till haply someone felt 
On his moved lips the seal of silence melt, 
Or, without spoken words, low breathings stole 
Of a diviner life from soul to soul, 
Baptizing in one tender thought the whole. "J 

The Friends' method of transacting the affairs 
of the Church is based on this principle, that all 
members partake of the one Spirit so that the 
position of any one member is to be tested by 

* " The Meeting." 

f Ibid. 

J " Pennsylvania Pilgrwt." 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 195 

the consciousness of spiritual guidance possessed 
by the entire body. All important business is 
transacted in unity and where such unity cannot 
be reached the matter is either delayed or 
dropped. 

As in the meeting for worship, so here, there 
is a gathering of the individuals into a unified 
and organic group. The man who rises to speak 
on a weighty matter is not a mere human atom, 
reciting a chance-formed opinion. He has been 
travailing in spirit with his fellows, and if he 
truly enters into the oneness of the group his 
word will voice more than his own thought. 

Immediately, too, the sensitive meeting will 
discover whether his communication is "in the 
life" or "out of the life," and his remarks will 
be weighed accordingly. The conclusion of a 
consideration is not arrived at by vote of any 
kind. The clerk simply announces "the sense 
of the meeting." The task is a delicate one 
and calls of course for a gifted person, but ex- 
perience shows that the clerk who is qualified for 
such delicate tasks is generally able to discover 
the sense of a meeting, when it is really held in 
this manner. 

If the meeting is rent by faction or is disturbed 
by stubborn and self -guided members the spir- 
itual method fails to work perfectly, as would 



196 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

naturally be expected. But where trie group is 
composed of spiritualized members there is gen- 
erally manifested a striking ability to discern and 
test the real value and quality of any individual 
utterance or " opening. ' ' The Spirit in the speaker 
is judged by the Spirit in the unified group. 

It was a deep insight which gave the name 
" Society of Friends" to this group of Christian 
believers. There is no visible head to the 
Society, nor in any of its local groups. There is 
no adopted creed or written code by which the 
1 'views" of the members are tested and settled. 
It is an organic spiritual group, each member 
partaking of the life and truth of the whole 
body, and making his own contribution to the 
progressive revelation of the truth. 

It is often called an extremely democratic 
body. But if by "democratic" one means that 
the individuals may think and say and do what- 
ever they choose, then it is not democratic. It 
is a growing organism in which every one has 
his free life and yet every one at the same time 
is subordinate to the whole. 

But now we shall see at once that as any 
individual Friend is by himself a fragment, and 
capable of attaining and expressing only partial 
aspects of truth and life, so too is this little 
group of believers by itself a fragment. 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 197 

The individual Friend must test his light by 
the larger revelation which comes to the fellow- 
ship of co-believers . How shall these co-believers 
test their faith and spirit? By the larger reve- 
lation which has come through prophets and 
apostles and saints and martyrs. 

There is an unbroken fellowship of faith, a 
never-ending revelation of God by which every 
Christian body tests its faith, and in union with 
which it renews its life.* No accent of the Holy 
Ghost may be passed by. No word or life which 
expresses to mortal the message of the Spirit of 
God may be left out. 

We prove best our claim to spiritual guidance 
to-day, if we manifest the fact that we realize 
and are fulfilling the truth already revealed. 
Our word is quick and powerful in so far as it 
is an unbroken continuation of the Word of 
God. We are in the life in so far as we are in 
fellowship with the saints, whose hands have 
held the torch of truth. 

Here we might perhaps stop, but there is one 
more point to urge. The entire truth is not to 
be found alone in the circle and fellowship of the 
"saints." No religion can be rightly called "a 

* In this deeper sense the Scripture will form a permanent 
test of guidance, and the historical Christ will be the norm and 
standard of spiritual life. 



198 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

religion of spiritual inwardness,' ' as Professor 
James has characterized Quakerism, unless it is 
at the same time a religion of spiritual out- 
wardness. 

The true test is to be sought, not in the 
feeling-state, but in the motor -effects, which the 
inner state produces. How much power does 
the particular insight give toward spiritualizing 
the actual world we live in, is the test question. 
One of the greatest tests of a truth is- that it 
works on another person. The soul, as Professor 
Lyman says, must always be able " to transmute 
its experiences, private and personal though 
they are, into a social force for the spiritualiza- 
tion of the human kind. ' ' 

No " opening" shall be called a real heavenly 
vision unless it does more than produce an 
inward thrill, unless it does more, too, than win 
the "amen" of the kindred spiritual group. It 
must be able to make the subject who experi- 
ences it a more dynamic person in the whole of 
society in which he lives. 

More than that. Our age is a social age. We 
have left a sharp individualism forever behind. 
The individual is an individual only as he is a 
contributing member in a social group. His 
openings, his calls, his spiritual tasks therefore 
will not be thrust in upon him out of the sky; 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 199 

they will rather rise out of the actual needs and 
condition of this social group of which he is a 
^part. 

He is, then, near the Divine Life, not only 
where his soul touches the infinite margin within 
the deeps of himself, he also is near this same 
Divine Life wherever he touches his fellows and 
enters into their real problems and joys and 
sufferings. The call that comes from some 
present human need is no less a divine call than 
is one which breaks over the threshold within 
himself. 

And the test now will be, Will obedience to 
this prompting construct not only a better 
person, but a better social group, a truer and a 
diviner fellowship ? 

It was here that George Fox, the first Quaker, 
found the severest test of his deepest insight, 
namely, that every man has something of God 
.within him. The truth of it can be verified only 
by calling everybody to put it to the test of 
experience. Up and down the England of the 
seventeenth century he traveled, calling men of 
every rank and walk of life to try it, to see 
whether obedience to this inward Word does not 
organize the life and help build up a truer social 
order. 

Men who were living worthless lives found in 



200 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

the message a word of life ; men who had been 
vainly seeking for some constructive principle of 
truth felt a new world open as they listened. 
It came as a revelation to the poor toiler and 
to the contemplative thinker. In a lifetime, in 
the face of one of the most stubborn persecu- 
tions in modern times, the simple word of truth 
gathered more than fifty thousand persons who 
had tested it and were ready to stake goods and 
life for it. 

There was a moment when one young man 
had the inward sense that Christ was near his 
soul and could speak to his condition. His heart 
leaped for joy and he had his high thrill of 
emotion. For the moment he needed no further 
proof. That emotion, however, could not last. 
It became only a dim memory. 

But his spiritual insight unified his activities 
and gave new direction to his whole life. He 
became the prophet of the truth, which at first 
was only a personal conviction, and slowly he 
saw it unify other lives and organize society. 
The truth verified itself in operation and made 
that dying testimony possible: "The Seed of 
God reigns over all . . . the power of God is 
over all and the Seed reigns over all disorderly 
spirits." The great Quakers in all periods have 
looked out rather than in. They have sought 



The Test of Spiritual Guidance 201 

social transformation rather than private, in- 
ward peace and joy. 

Saintly John Woolman has given us in a 
sentence the fundamental principle: "So far 
as true love influences our minds, so far we 
become interested in God's workmanship, 
and feel a desire to make use of every 
opportunity to lessen the distress of the afflicted 
and to increase the happiness of creation. Here 
we have the prospect of one common interest, 
from which our own is inseparable, so that 
to turn all that we possess into the channel 
of universal love becomes the business of our 
lives." 

"In that day," said the Master to His dis- 
ciples, "when my love is manifested in you," 
"ye shall know that ye are in me and I in 
you." 

Here again, then, as we feel out for the Divine 
Life and the Divine sanction we find ourselves 
woven into a mighty social tissue through which 
God's life and purpose and will are slowly 
expressing themselves and through which every 
deed of ours proves its fitness. That which is 
" of God ' ' in our lives and that which is revealed 
of Him in our word and deed must fit into this 
spiritual order of our common humanity and 
must prove its value by promoting and advanc- 



202 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

ing this order. In this social fabric every 
deed and word is tested. That deed is fit 
which adds one more thread to the web of 
spiritual life, which makes the pattern in 
the mount more clearly visible in our actual 
human society. 

" So at this roaring loom of life we ply, 
And weave the garment ye see God by." 



Faith as a Pathway to Reality 



"Faith is the beginning of action." 

"The exercise of Faith directly becomes knowledge." 

"Faith is a kind of Divine mutual and reciprocal correspondence." 

"Faith is the power of God, being the strength of the truth." 

Sayings from the "Miscellanies" 

op Clement of Alexandria. 

"Faith is the soul's spiritual sense." J. Brierley. 

"Faith is the assurance of things hoped for; the proving of things not 
seen." Hebrews xi. i. 



Faith as a Pathway to Reality 

Few words have ever been compelled to bear 
such heavy burdens as our word " Faith. " When 
religion has been of a high and spiritual sort, 
faith has had a noble meaning and a vital func- 
tion; when religion has dropped to a low plane, 
and has been made a scheme to ferry the soul 
from an evil world to a peaceful paradise, faith 
has sunk to the level of credulity, or even super- 
stition. When a man tells what he means by 
faith, we know at once what his religion is. 

Faith is like patriotism. It reveals at a glance 
the type of one's citizenship. The gamut of 
patriotism, as everyone knows, has a very long 
sweep from its lowest to its highest note. So, 
too, has the gamut of faith, which, after all, is 
patriotism, patriotism toward the spiritual order 
— the Kingdom of God. 

Harm and havoc have always been wrought 
whenever the attempt has been made to treat 
faith as though it were the antithesis of reason — 
or, as the little boy in the Sunday-school naively 

205 



206 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

defined it, as " believing something which you 
know isn't so." 

We must leave behind, too, forever the view 
that faith means holding an unverified opinion, 
or accepting something on authority, or " keep- 
ing" an heirloom of traditional thought or 
practice. In other words, faith is neither blind 
nor passive nor irrational. Let that be enough 
of negatives. 

Faith is one of our ways of dealing with reality, 
and when used legitimately it is every whit as 
valid as knowledge is, using "knowledge" for 
the moment in the narrow sense.* Knowledge, 
i. e. t knowledge of description, can deal only 
with that which is limited, bounded, quanti- 
tative. 

Every object which we know is somewhere' in 
space. If it is accurately, that is to say, scien- 
tifically, known, it can be completely described. 

* ' ' Faith does not controvert any of the conclusions of 
science that have been reasonably verified or that have any hope 
of verification. It does not require science to prove any pecu- 
liar conclusions of its own. But it values its own experience as 
knowledge. It has experienced the reality and power of infinite 
love and righteousness. It has the conviction empirically 
verified that the world is the work of God and is realizing His 
ends. For science to deny the reality of these experiences of 
faith, and to insist that they are not knowledge, is pure dogma- 
tism. . . . Ultimately science must recognize the primacy of 
faith." — Eugene W. Lyman, on " Faith and Mysticism,' 1 
American Journal of Theology, for July, 1904. 



Faith as a Pathway to Reality 207 

But a description seizes only the general and 
quantitative aspects. The world of reality is 
surely richer than it appears when science has 
reduced it to description, for descriptive science 
totally ignores all estimates of worth or value 
in what it describes. 

The process of description, when it goes to the 
bitter end, squeezes the last drop of life blood 
out of the phenomenon, whatever it may be. 
Description rigidly accounts for everything and 
chains everything fast in the bonds of law and 
causality. There is no more scope here for free 
activity, for mystic suggestion or for spiritual 
values than there is for vegetation on an iceberg 
in the far northern seas. 

When science undertakes to describe religion, 

as anyone may see in the books, it is never what 

fthe religious soul means by it as an inward 

j experience. Descriptions of religion in terms of 

origin leave it as unspiritual as the fossils in a 

chalk down. 

But descriptions in terms of physiology are 
hardly more like the living experience. Con- 
version becomes a phenomenon of adolescence. 
Spiritual openings appear as forms of hysteria, 
due to nervous degeneration. The highest states 
of adoration or worship are reduced to bodily 
states and finally are described as molecular 



208 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

motion — to be catalogued as the same sort of 
facts as light waves in ether! 

A moment's reflection shows that neither here, 
nor indeed anywhere, does science give actual 
reality. Consciousness is not the same thing as 
\tlie describable dance of brain cells. Redness is 
not the same thing as four hundred billions of 
ether oscillations a second. 

Religion is not the same thing as this juiceless 
description by the anthropologist or psycholo- 
gist. The best that science can do is to give us 
objects stark dead, cold and rigid. It transforms 
whatever it describes and leaves it utterly 
stripped of worth. 

To science the microbe has the same worth 
as the genius who is killed by it. It asks only 
what is; not what ought to be. Its region is the 
region of bare facts; not of ideals, of ends, of 
purposes. 

But nobody can actually live in such a bare, 
dry world as this. We have will-attitudes. We 
stain the white radiance of intellect with emo- 
tional color. The heart will not keep silent. 
Every act reveals the fact that things do have 
worth, that we care more for this than for that. 

The whole drama of our destiny is swayed by 
conscious purposes, life-ends. The most poverty- 
stricken person who is dragging out his existence 



Faith as a Pathway to Reality 209 

in this vale of tears has an ideal which will work 
effectively in the next decision he makes. He 
puts an estimate of worth upon all the situations 
he deals with. Nothing is ever, for him or for 
any self-conscious being, a mere describable that. 

Doubtless man could have been made so that 
consciousness would have ended in such bare 
knowledge. But so he has not been made. 
There is always something in the depths of our 
constitution which outruns "knowledge." 

Description, be it ever so accurate, never tells 
the whole truth. No, we all have another door 
to reality besides this door of knowledge. There 
is a kingdom of ends. Every item of experience 
is tested by a standard of worth. Every fact 
either fits some purpose, or it does not. It is 
either good for our ends or it is not good, and 
we act toward it accordingly. 

When we say we "know" an object we gen- 
erally mean that we have an estimate of its 
worth, that we appreciate it, and not that we 
can describe it. I say " I know my friend." I 
do not mean that I can give such an exact 
description of him that no element or aspect of 
his being is left out. I mean rather that I have 
discovered and appreciate his ideals. I have 
felt his sympathy and love. I have somewhat 
entered into his spirit. I have a well-grounded 
14 



2 1 o Social Law in the Spiritual World 

estimate of his worth. In a word, / believe in 
him. 

By which method do I most genuinely arrive 
at his reality; by the descriptive method, or by 
the appreciative method ? For identifying him, 
a scar on his arm or a wax impression of his 
thumb would perhaps be sufficient. 

But for my purposes it is wide of the mark! 
I have come upon his reality by successive test- 
ing of his worth as fast as I appreciated it. 
Each act of his reveals a character which I 
appreciate, a spirit which I feel, a goodness 
which runs far beyond just this present act. 
I thus learn to trust him, to count on him, to 
value his ideal. I put my estimate upon him. 
His daily deeds, his ordinary actions, his life, 
in a word, confirms me. Each time I see him 
facing the situations of his life I find him doing 
what I expected and prophesied of him, I dis- 
cover anew the reliability of his spirit. My 
estimate of worth thus becomes enriched, and 
what once was a faith of insight is transformed 
to a faith of experience, a faith of surety, a 
practiced faith. 

I am as far as ever from the knowledge of 
description — I have no wax impression or cata- 
logue account of his inner life — but I have found 
it by my sense of value, my power of apprecia- 



Faith as a Pathway to Reality 211 

tion, and I have tested its reality by practical 
experience. This is what we mean by faith. 

Even science itself follows this method. It 
cannot move a step without starting with a 
truth which is unproved. There can be no 
science at all without assuming the uniformity 
— e£ nature, i. e., that laws and principles which 
work to-day in this part of the universe will 
hold equally well at any remote time in any 
part of the universe.* 

Then, again, we must begin with a belief that 
the many particular things which we study 
-^belong in a total whole, that spite of the diver- 
sity there is ultimate unity. Further still we 
must have faith in the rationality of the universe. 
We could not even start to have a science if we 
admitted that the universe might just possibly 
be "an insane sand-heap." 

But who will prove to me that there are relation 
and significance and system and unity and intel- 
ligibility in every minutest detail of this endless 
congeries of nebula, comet, sun, satellite, planet, 
earth-history, brain-cell, will-impulse and heart's 
desire which we are trying to reduce to order? 

* " The principle of uniformity in nature . . . has to be 
sought under and in spite of the most rebellious appearances; 
and our conviction of its truth is far more like a religious faith 
than like an assent to a demonstration." — Prof. William 
James, "Psychology" Vol. II, pp. 636, 637. 



212 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

Nobody. I need that truth to start my work 
with. I feel that in that sign I can conquer. 
I see its value for my purpose and I make my 
venture of faith. 

Who knows whether sensations give any true 
report about a world outside? Who will prove 
for us the dogma of universal causation? Who 
will establish the necessary operation of laws? 
Why, nobody! Doubt these things at your 
peril! You need them as furniture for your 
journey. You cannot start without them. They 
must be presupposed, taken at a venture and 
used. 

By a sweep of insight the mind transcends 
what is seen and known, and seizes these prin- 
ciples because of their worth for its ends. But 
see how they gather weight as they are tested ! 

Every fact of science has been established by 
means of them. Every advance in the long 
history of progressive knowledge has tested 
these principles. They are no longer assump- 
tions; they are the very keel and backbone of 
our surest and soundest knowledge. But we 
have come to knowledge only because we prac- 
ticed our faith. Both science and religion regard 
verification as the final court of appeal. 

There is one realm of our life which exists for 
us only through our power of appreciation, our 



Faith as a Pathway to Reality 213 

sense of worth, namely, our world of beauty. 
Here at least we find what we carry with us. The 
carpenter can tell us how many square inches 
there are to the canvas of the Sistine Madonna. 
The chemist can tell the exact composition of 
the paint. The sociologist can perhaps explain 
how it was that in this particular century men 
painted Madonnas, and so on. But it is totally 
another thing to feel the power and the beauty 
of this creation. The beautiful cannot be reduced 
to anything but just itself. It is its own excuse 
for being. 

Description does not help us here. We are 
following another path to reality. We possess a 
capacity, fundamental and original as our capa- 
city for " knowledge," by which we appreciate 
the indescribable worth of things. 

An object is beautiful for us when we discover 
that it is as it ought to be. The outer and the 
inner fit. But that means of course that we 
carry our own standard with us. We interpret 
the world by our ideals of fitness and worth. 

At first our beauty-sense is very crude. It is 
hardly more than an instinct — a tendency to 
grasp in the object some aspect of it which gives 
joy and relieves us from the poverty of the bare 
actual. Our own lives are too rich to be satisfied 
with bare, finite things and we trust our need for 



214 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

something more perfect. In the world we see, 
we look for something which satisfies us and is 
sufficient for us. And behold, as we trust this 
sense, step by step it organizes a world for us 
which is no less real than this imperfect one 
which our hands touch and our eyes see. We 
soon discover that we have added a new world 
to our domain. 

Our neighbor may pay taxes on his field and 
own it in freehold, but in a very true sense it 
is ours, because we have learned to appreciate 
its beauty and to possess its inalienable worth. 
Through our appreciation, that field has become 
a window into an eternal reality. This is just 
the characteristic of a beautiful object that it 
hints and suggests the infinite and carries us 
into a world which is as it ought to be. It 
brings "the invisible full into play." 

But such a world is not thrust upon us from 
without. It is won by obedience to and trust 
in our need of such a world, our capacity for a 
perfect unity, our growing standard of worth. 
Our faith at first is trust in our own capacity to 
find what we need. But as we act upon it this 
implicit faith comes back to us enriched. It 
builds a world for us, 

" Where with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
We see into the life of things." 



Faith as a Pathway to Reality 215 

We find what we have sought, a world not 
made out of things which do appear, the real 
pattern in the mount. 

The presuppositions of science are justified 
because they organize knowledge; the sense of 
beauty proves its value by constructing a world 
of deeper reality in which we find, actually, what 
the describable world never gives us. 

There is still another way of estimating the 
world which points to a still more ultimate 
realm of things. All our rational acts presup- 
pose faith in goodness. We act each time to 
attain an end which before was ideal and existed 
only for faith. The moment it is attained it 
brings with it a new vision of a farther good 
beyond. To be a person means to act for ends 
which we believe are good, to live under the 
sway of an ideal. 

Now this kind of a life is never for a minute 
possible without faith — first of course in the 
value of the immediate ideal. 

But more than that; it presupposes faith in 
a whole of goodness.* As we saw. there can be 

* " The necessary postulate of science, without which scien- 
tific activity would be impossible, is the rational order of the 
universe; and similarly, the necessary postulate of religion, 
without which religious activity would be impossible, is a moral 
order of the universe. As science postulates the final triumph 
of reason, so religion must postulate the final triumph of 



2i 6 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

no rationality in one single fact except as it 
belongs in a unity whose principle is rationality. 
There can be no beauty except as the single 
object gives us a revelation of an integral whole. 
Isolate an act, break it apart, let it suggest 
nothing beyond the deed and it loses its meaning. 
It is good only because it ministers to more 
goodness. We act for an end, and as far as we 
do it rationally, we act because we believe in 
goodness. The deed is not forced from behind. 
We have acted because we had a consideration 
of worth, because we exercised faith in the 
reality of a goodness which we sought. 

Being made as we are, no will-acts are possible 
without such an assumption — such a venture of 
faith. It is a necessity of the nature of things. 
To be moral is to postulate goodness. This faith 
is grounded in the imperative demand of our 
being. 

Genuine faith, such as we care to talk about 

righteousness. Science believes in the rational order, or in law, 
in spite of apparent confusion; she knows that disorder is only- 
apparent, only the result of ignorance; and her mission is to 
show this by reducing all appearances, all phenomena, to law. 
So also religion is right in her unshakable belief in the moral 
order, in spite of apparent disorder and evil; she knows that 
evil is only apparent, the result of our ignorance and our weak- 
ness ; and her mission is to show this by helping on the triumph 
of moral order over disorder." — Professor LeConte, in his 
Essay in Royce's " Conception of God," pp. 70-71. 



Faith as a Pathway to Reality 217 

here, means, therefore, the will to act as though 
we knew for the sake of an end which we seek. 
To believe a truth is, then, to act as though it 
were known to be true. This sort of faith is 
easily capable of test. , Whether it begins as an 
instinct — like the mother bird brooding on a 
nestful of eggs which her experience has never 
seen hatched — or as an imitation, or as a response 
to authority, in any case, its test of validity will 
be, that it organizes and realizes an actual good- 
ness for us. 

It causes action w r hich builds something into 
our world of true reality. The faith in what 
was not seen enabled us to win it. Again, in 
this sign we conquer. Our victories are all due 
to our belief in goodness at the heart of things. 

Behold now, how the outcome of this trust 
piles up evidence for the reality of goodness, 
how each act enlightens us with the demonstra- 
tion of experience. The spiritual energy which 
comes into play confirms the faith which made it 
possible . Faith manifests its validity at each step . 

But we cannot stop at "goodness" as though 
it were a thing-in-itself . There is no rationality 
apart from Reason, and there can be no good- 
ness except as the expression of the will and 
purpose, the heart and character of a self- 
conscious Being. 



2 1 8 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

The entire progress of the race toward good- 
ness, the coercive power of our own ideals which 
shape our lives, proclaim the truth that goodness 
belongs to the eternal nature of things. And 
that is only another way of saying that the 
living God is the eternal nature of things, that 
the spirit in us corresponds with an Absolute 
Self-conscious Life in whom all our ideals of 
worth and goodness are at once realities, and 
all our valuations are fulfilled. 

Our own life, if it is to have meaning and sig- 
nificance and value at all, compels such faith. 
By an inner necessity we must trust in a perma- 
nent goodness in order to complete ourselves, 
we must believe in the permanence of values in 
order to act upon our coercive sense of values, 
and that implies that we are already living by 
an inexpugnable sense of an Infinite Being in 
whose life we are. 

But faith should not stop at this implicit 
stage, where one trusts even beyond his knowing 
that he trusts. " Do not even the publicans the 
same?" It may begin, as we have seen, in an 
instinct, it may unconsciously organize our moral 
purposes for us, but on this level it always 
remains more or less blind. 

No person is truly spiritual until he knows 
why he acts, until he passes from an instinctive 



Faith as a Pathway to Reality 219 

to a conscious choice, based upon an insight 
into the significance of the act. Thus faith 
should steadily pass over from this belief in 
the permanence of values by which we live 
to a personal and conscious relation of the soul 
with God. 

Faith begins with a trust in the goodness 
which is dimly shadowed forth in the world we 
see, but it changes into an inner principle of 
spiritual relationship which makes the divine 
Life no less certain than is the consciousness 
of our own finite existence. 
— The revelation of God is like the revelation of 
\ music. Music is revealed, can be revealed, only 
through a musician. It comes to be reality, to 
be influencing power, a subduing and controlling 
force only as an appreciative mind seizes and 
expresses the meaning and value of harmony. 
To the musician himself the world of harmony 
which he blindly felt at first as he laboriously 
toiled to master his instrument has now become 
a reality not a whit less real than are the scenery 
and circumstance of his life of sense. 

He knows that while he is contributing his 
skill to express some melodious creation, the 
great laws of harmony, the principles of beauty 
in sound, are not his creation; he has merely 
spelled out and uttered a fragment of an eternal 



220 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

harmony which stretches on beyond his highest 
reach of skill and capability to express. 

But he knows it as far as he is the organ of its 
expression ; he has discovered it as far as he can 
appreciate it. His faith means a trust in "the 
more yet ' ' beyond that which in his inmost self 
he knows and can make others know. His faith 
is evidence of things not seen. Somewhat so 
does our faith in God undergo a heightening. 

At first faith is an instinctive hunger for more 
than our present life realizes. We feel in some 
dim way our contact with a world of spiritual 
reality and we begin to appreciate it. There is 
an imperative demand of our being for a perfect 
tc supplement our imperfection, and like the 
musician we venture our act of faith. We act 
on the faith that there is an absolute Being who 
will share His life with us and who will confirm 
our timid faith. 

Well, this venture of faith, which the soul's 
native hunger sets in action, gets its reward. 
It finds an object which meets its need. It 
appropriates into its own life some of that good- 
ness which before seemed outside and foreign 
to it. It knows now of a Divine Being at least J 
as much as its act of faith has appropriated. 
This act too has increased its spiritual energy, 
for further effort of a similar sort. The validity 



Faith as a Pathway to Reality 221 

of faith has stood a test. Thus the process goes 
on. Little by little a new self appears which this 
venture of faith builds up. 

The goodness which once seemed so remote 
and foreign begins to show its actuality in us. 
The world of spiritual reality and of perfect 
goodness, which we believed in at first because 
we needed it, has confirmed itself to us and is 
now in some slight measure getting expression 
through us. What we thus appreciate and 
appropriate into our own sphere of life comes to 
have the same reality that our own inner con- 
sciousness has. 

But all the time this tested faith is giving us 
suggestions and prophecies of infinite Life and 
Goodness yet unattained and unwon, beyond us, 
as that world of harmony is beyond any given 
attainment of the musician who knows that he 
has found the key to the realm. 

The same thing is illustrated by our definitely 
Christian faith. At first we have a lot of pic- 
torial images of Christ; then we learn from 
others the significance of His life in terms of 
doctrine, and little by little it begins to dawn 
upon us what this life really means in itself. 
We dwell no longer on this text or that, on this 
particular incident or that. 

We come to estimate the Life as a Life. We 



222 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

begin to discover how it fits our need. We 
see how it would necessarily affect us if all 
this Gospel were actually true. We set to 
living in the light of it and under its mighty 
attraction, and lo ! we see something new come 
into us. 

Once more the ancient miracle is worked 
anew — the love of Christ constraineth us to 
leave our old self and go to living for Him who 
loved us and gave Himself for us. We go from 
the belief in a report to an experience of power 
at work upon us. 

Faith is thus a spiritual process which pro- 
duces a religion as " first-hand' ' as is the religion 
founded on mystical experiences. 

Our faith, then, is on its higher side an actual 
appropriation of the Divine Life, a positive 
realization of spiritual goodness, which steadily 
moves toward a conscious relationship of the 
soul to God. God is then no longer foreign and 
merely accepted on authority. He becomes the 
operative Life that organizes a spiritual life in 
us, and faith at this stage is the consciousness 
that our life is hid with Christ in God, that in 
Him we live and move and are. 

The God of our faith is forever linked in with 
our own lives. We believe in Him because we 
find Him. He is as close to us as is the ideal 



Faith as a Pathway to Reality 223 

which moves us to action — all our spiritual gains 
reveal His presence. 

We know now as much as we have appreciated 
and realized in our own lives, and that gives us 
solid ground for the faith that we may eternally 
go on knowing the God whom our faith has 
revealed to us, and becoming more possessed of 
this Life which organizes our own. The isolation 
which first gave birth to our venture of faith is 
past. The foreignness of God is gone. We have 
found our life in the Source of it, as the branch 
does in the vine. 

" O Power, more near my life than life itself 
(Or what seems life to us in sense immured) 
Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth, 
Share in the tree-top's joyance, and conceive 
Of sunshine and wide air and winged things 
By sympathy of nature, so do I 
Have evidence of Thee so far above, 
Yet in and of me! Rather Thou the root 
Invisibly sustaining, hid in light, 
Not darkness, or in darkness made by us." 

Lowell's " Cathedral." 



The Self and the Over-Self 



15 



"Afresh I seek thee. Lead me — once more I pray — 
Even should it be against my will, thy way. 
Let me not feel thee foreign anyhow, 
Or shrink from thee as an estranged power. 

Through doubt, through faith, through bliss, through stark dismay, 
Through sunshine, wind or snow, or fog or shower, 
Draw me to thee who art my only day. 



'Ever above my coldness or my doubt 

Rises up something, reaching forth a hand: 

This thing I know, but cannot understand 

Is it the God in me that rises out 

Beyond myself, trailing it up with Him, 

Toward the spirit-home, the freedom-land. 

Beyond my conscious ken, my near horizon's brim?" 

George Macdonald's "Diary of an Old Soul" 



The Self and the Over-Self 

Nobody can even begin to answer the ques- 
tion, " Who am I?" without seriously taking up 
a cosmic task. There is never an idea or a will- 
act in the private life of any person which can 
be explained by itself or in itself. Do we love 
or hate; do we feel scorn or pity; are we 
ambitious or discouraged ? Every such attitude 
carries us beyond a "bare self." 

We can explain the movements of the earth 
in space only by looking away to a larger cosmos 
in which the earth is interrelated with many 
other gravitate bodies. We can account for the 
remarkable functions of a brain-cell only as we 
study the entire brain system in which this single 
cell is an organic member. 

So, too, of the private, personal self. To be 
a self is to be united to a wider consciousness 
than that of which one is momentarily aware. 
All consciousness involves an appeal to more 
consciousness. There is not a single item of 

227 



228 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

reality which can be verified without drawing 
upon experience, which is not just now my 
experience. Whether it is the reality of the 
multiplication table or a promise in Scripture 
which I seek to establish, I must rely upon 
something not at this moment known in my own 
immediate and private consciousness. 

Experience means nothing unless it is always 
embedded in and organic with more experience. 
Cut any moment of experience apart from its 
relationships with larger experience and it 
becomes forthwith as dead as the lava in the 
moon. 

We can neither affirm nor deny, believe nor 
doubt, without falling back upon some wider 
consciousness which we trust. If we are not 
to stand stock still in petrified agnosticism we 
must find our way to an Experience which 
embraces all our private experiences in organic 
unity and of which they are living parts.* 

Now the fact is that every state of conscious- 
ness implies such a reality. Every partial 

* " To base a truth on experience is a loose manner of talk- 
ing, not one whit better than the alleged Indian foundation of 
the earth on the elephant, and the elephant erected on the tor- 
toise. For by Experience is meant experiences; and these rest 
one upon another, one upon another, till at length, if this be 
all that holds them together, the last hangs unsupported and 
with its superincumbent load ready to drop in the abyss of 
Nought." — Wallace, " Prolegomena to Hegel's Logic," p. 168. 



The Self and the Over-Self 229 

experience requires a whole to explain it. Even 
our sense of finiteness which comes in every 
state of knowing or feeling or willing is big with 
significance. There are many persons who 
appear to be haunted with an immediate sense 
of the infinite. " I was aware, " says one of these 
mystics, "that I was immersed in the infinite 
ocean of God. " There is plenty of testimony 
which points in this direction, and many of us 
have had our moments when the whole of 
things was at least as real to us as is our "tiny 
spark of being." 

But we are not now dealing with mystical 
testimony. We are searching for the implica- 
tions involved in normal consciousness. There 
is a steady testimony to the fact that every 
person discovers himself to be finite, his present 
pleasure to be insufficient, his attainment incom- 
plete. 

Whatever is "given" at any moment is too 
poor and limited for us. To be human is to 
discover one's finiteness. 

' ' We look before and after 
And pine for what is not." 

Now what does this sense of finiteness imply ? 
"We grant," says Emerson, "that human life is 
mean, but how did we find out that it is mean?" 

* J. Trevor, "My Quest for God," p. 268. 



230 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

There must be an infinite aspect to a person 
who has a knowledge of finiteness. 

Finiteness means nothing except by reference 
to the infinite. The mind which pronounces its 
" states" finite and which discovers the things 
of this world to be vain and fleeting can make 
those judgments only by a criterion which tran- 
scends the finite. An absolutely finite being — 
the cicada singing its hour on a blade of grass, 
for instance — would never be aware of finiteness. 
To know a limit is to have passed it. To be 
conscious of incompleteness is to partake of the 
fulness of life. 

Nothing is more certain, more surely a fact, 
than that every state of consciousness transcends 
its finitude, goes beyond its own limits and 
is what it is because of the more yet which will 
explain and fulfil it. Every "now" of con- 
sciousness demands a " beyond " for its meaning, 
and if the " beyond ' ' is not real, then the " now ' ' 
has no reality. The truth is that the finite and 
the infinite can never be sundered. 

An infinite set over against the finite would 
be limited and so not infinite at all. Neither 
could be real alone, apart. That consciousness 
which knows finitude is joined into a Life which 
is infinite and eternal. Our finite is found by 
marking off and isolating for our momentary 



The Self and the Over-Self 231 

purpose something which is real only in the 
infinite whole. 

Our finite is thus always set in an unexplored 
infinite which contains in its inexhaustible stores 
our bit of a self; our life is always hid in a 
deeper life. The unity of personal consciousness 
which is aware of finiteness involves in itself 
infiniteness. This comes more clearly to light 
when we study the pursuit of an ideal — an un- 
realized good. 

We could not start on the pursuit after a 
good if we did not in some degree possess the 
good which we seek. We must at least know 
enough about it to want it. There would 
assuredly be no ideals for any of us, if we were 
not inseparably united to something higher than 
ourselves, something " inherently kith and kin" 
to our own lives. 

Here again we may discover how true it is that 
we are fragments of a larger Life, that our con- 
scious self does not comprise the whole of us. 
The " ought to be" toward which we all, as 
persons, live always runs ahead of any actual 
"is." That is a primary characteristic of per- 
sonality. To stay satisfied in any attainment 
and to reduce life to an actual describable fact 
would be to lose one's soul, to come to an end of 
personality. A person is a being who is living 



232 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

toward an unrealized purpose, an unattained 
ideal. 

But that purpose, that ideal, is already 
coercive, it is dynamic, it is causative. It is 
already something to be reckoned with. In 
order to be an actual ideal for me, it must be 
real for somebody. It is like and yet it is unlike 
a lost word for which I seek and which, though 
now beyond the margin of my conscious self, I 
shall recognize as mine as soon as I come to it 
in some deeper stratum where it hides. I could 
have neither the sense of the lost word nor the 
vision of a " further good," if my conscious self 
of the moment were the whole of me. 

In one case I am haunted by a self that has 
been, and in the other case by a self that may 
be, by a self that should be. If the "lost" word 
is a reality and is even now known in the fringe 
of consciousness, so too is the ideal already a 
reality and actual to the Self in whose life I 
share. 

Isolate my life and reduce me to a " bare self " 
and all my strivings and seekings would cease. 
I aspire and pursue larger quests because I am 
rooted and grounded in a larger Self. This is 
the meaning of Pascal's saying which has 
already been quoted, Thou wouldst not seek 
God if thou hadst not already found Him. 



The Self and the Over-Self 233 

No man can think, no man can be a person 
and not in himself perceive, 

" Sometimes at waking in the street sometimes, 
Or on the hillside, always unforewarned, 
A grace of being, finer than himself 
That beckons and is gone, — a larger life 
Upon his own impinging with swift glimpse 
Of spacious circles luminous with mind, 
To which the ethereal substance of his own 
Seems but gross cloud to make that visible, 
Touched to a sudden glory round the edge."* 

There is more than " poetry" here. Each 
slenderest act of ours, done with purpose, 
involves more mind than we consciously put 
into the act. 

The partial, transient deed has a meaning 
which transcends our " reasons" for it and is a 
temporal expression of a purpose which can be 
accounted for only through the aim or thought 
of a whole life, of which this deed is a tiny aspect. 

Every concrete act is significant because it 
translates into common language the sacred 
universal — in other words, each good which we 
seek is an aspect of the Good. 

One reason why life is so full of tragedy is 
that we know so little what we really want and 
that we never quite see all that any choice of 
our own involves. We cannot analyze this want 
of the moment and discover all that lies in it. 

* Lowell, " The Cathedral" 



234 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

That is to say, every purpose is a fragment of a 
larger whole. The child wants sugar-plums ; he 
is ignorant that toothache and other pains go 
with them. The young man wants exact scholar- 
ship and a character which men will trust; he 
does not foresee, or only in a dim way, all the 
drudgery of daily lessons, the patient search for 
facts, the close and narrow restraint of discipline 
which such an aim involves. 

Even foolish seekers for " goods" — like the 
drunkard, who takes his woefully short cut to a 
moment of fulness of life — all want to transcend 
some finite limitation, and they miss their aim 
because they fail to discover what is inherently 
bound up in that particular choice. They do 
not see how this deed is organic with a whole 
life, and less still how this life is organic with 
the eternal nature of things which they must 
learn by experience. 

Nothing finally turns out to be "good" which 
does not lead on into more good, nothing which 
does not minister to an expanding purpose. But 
that means surely that we could seek good ends 
only by belonging in a larger Life which already 
possesses the Good. We discover the good by 
discovering the purposes of the Self in whose life 
we share. We pursue the good because in some 
measure we already possess it. 



The Self and the Over-Self 235 

In short, goodness means that finite lives are 
organic members of a One Self which includes 
these finite selves of ours. As far as we " isolate ' ' 
our aims and seek ends that terminate in our 
own narrow selfhood, we "lose" our lives. The 
good we seek is too partial and fragmentary to 
construct a true self. 

As far, on the contrary, as we aim at some 
universal and expanding good — an ideal which 
actually ministers to the life of man — we shall 
find that we have been working out the will of 
a Being who has been taking us ever more 
deeply into Himself. 

Our moral purposes, thus, imply that we have 
an organic life in one spiritual Self. Our rela- 
tions with an external world also point toward 
the same conclusion. Here in this external 
world we work out our purposes. Our duties 
are all born here. In this sphere of the actual 
world, which blocks or furthers our wishes, we 
get all our moral discipline. 

Its great machinery conquers us, and we turn 
out to be cowards and weaklings ; we overcome 
its blows and buffetings and we are counted 
heroic and worthy of the palm. A world which 
has such deep and intimate relation with our 
inner life cannot be altogether foreign to us. In 
some close way it fits our purposes, and it often 



236 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

ministers to us best when it defeats our easy, 
momentary wishes. " The meanest flower that 
blows ' ' has significance. The faintest star of the 
sky says something to the wise man. The outer 
and the inner fit. Why do they fit? What 
makes the outer world so full of significance? 
It is because both outer and inner are related 
parts of one deeper whole. Either alone would 
be unreal and fragmentary. 

Whenever we examine any object of the ex- 
ternal world we are surprised to find how much 
of it turns out to be thought-stuff. Whatever we 
know about it, we express in terms of mind. 
Color is a mental affair. So too are all the other 
qualities by which we describe any " thing." 

What an object would be apart from any eye 
to see its color, apart from any ear to hear its 
sound, apart from any hand to feel its roughness 
and hardness, apart from any mind to discover 
a use and purpose for it, of all that we are forever 
ignorant. The " things " in our world are things 
about which we have ideas. Their reality is 
always a reality for our consciousness. 

Strip away all my ideas from any known 
object — for instance, this crowbar — take away 
all the thought-stuff, reduce it to its own naked 
reality. What does it become? I can say 
nothing about it. It is not in my world any 



The Self and the Over-Self 237 

longer. It has become unknowable, for I can 
know a "thing" only so far as I can get some 
mental material about it. 

A crowbar which was neither colored, nor 
cold, nor hard, nor long, nor inflexible, would 
be a very uncanny instrument ! It would be like 
a smile without any face ! 

No, the objects of our world are objects which 
are known in our thought, and which can be 
described in terms of ideas so as to be known 
by all minds like our own. Name any object 
and it becomes my object — my mind is full of 
ideas about it; I think its qualities; I become 
conscious of its value and it influences my will. 
In short it is completely related to my mind. 

Everybody feels the absurdity of attempting 
to cut off a stick so as to have only one end to it, 
or to get a board so thin that it has only one side ! 
That is no more absurd than to separate a thing 
from a thinker, an object from a subject. There 
is no reality to any world unrelated and foreign 
to a self that knows it. That would be a stick 
with only one end! 

But equally impossible is it to have a subject 
without an object — a knower without a some- 
thing known. Every idea is an idea about an 
object. A consciousness that thinks nothing 
should rather be called ^consciousness. No 



238 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

subject, no object; no object, no subject. The 
mind without a world for its object would be the 
other end of that impossible stick! The person 
who withdraws from the world to dwell in the 
quiet deeps of his own wonderful self, where 
no object of thought distracts him, fails just in 
so far as he succeeds ; for the attainment of that 
purpose would be the annihilation of conscious 
selfhood. 

The primary fact of self-consciousness is the 
unity of subject and object. The self as knower 
cannot be severed from the object known, the 
object known cannot be severed from a knower. 
They are indivisibly present in every state of 
consciousness. Solomon might as well undertake 
to make two living babies by cutting in two the 
poor mother's child as for us to try to get two 
separable worlds by setting the ego, or knower, 
on one side, and the non-ego, or object-world, on 
the other, as a thing by itself. Outer and inner 
are forever one, not two. As well try to make 
two independent things out of the convex and 
concave sides of the sky! In every pulse of 
consciousness there is an outer and an inner 
aspect. 

Thought can abstract one aspect — let us say 
the outer — and think of it as though it were real 
alone. But by itself it is a mere abstraction and 



The Self and the Over-Self 239 

not an ultimate reality at all. The ultimate 
reality is a unified consciousness of self and 
object, in which consciousness object and subject 
form a concrete system. We may as well stop 
talking of anything, whether it be a fact or a 
world-system, which is assumed to be and to 
exist outside and beyond consciousness. Fly 
whithersoever one may, he finds nothing which 
is not unified with the consciousness which 
knows it, and which is not inseparable from that 
consciousness. Everywhere outer and inner fit. 
Everywhere subject and object in one living 
pulse of thought. 

The world of nature and law, the world which 
seems so rigid and solid and material, is really 
bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh — every 
least bit of the stuff out of which it is woven is 
thought -stuff. Take away what is mental and 

"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded 
Leave not a rack behind." 

Yes, but out of whose thought is it woven? 
This finite, private self of mine is surely no 
world-creator. I find myself in a stubborn 
world-order to which I must fit myself. It may 
be thought-stuff, but it long antedated my 
arrival, and it sweeps infinitely beyond my little 



240 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

scope. I can only play with a few pebbles on 
the shore. I can only spell out by slow experi- 
ence the facts which are forced upon me without 
anyone saying, " By your leave!" 

My purposes are often fickle and capricious. 
I make up my will and then unmake it. Not 
so is this larger world in which I live and through 
which I discover the system of the universe and 
the purpose of the Infinite. Here there is rigidity 
and regularity. Here there is law and order. 
Even in the flux and flow of things there is a 
mighty purpose which does not vary. Whether 
I like the course of things or not, the stream 
moves on. I adjust myself to it as best I can. 
There is a will deeper than mine at the heart of 
things. There is a wisdom infinitely transcend- 
ing mine, which " sculptures the globes of the 
firmament and writes the moral law," a higher 
Reason whose thought appears in "the choir of 
heaven and the furniture of earth." 

I find myself in a cosmic system. I have so 
far spelled out only a very little of its meaning. 
Whenever I reach a new fact, I discover that it 
is enfolded in a setting of mystery, still waiting 
to be explored. I am surely a fragment and 
every experience of mine points to an infinite 
possibility of future experiences. 

But every experience which I do have links 



The Self and the Over-Self 241 

into my own consciousness and makes a fact for 
me some truth which must already before have 
been real for a larger Mind of which I partake. 
Bare possibilities of experience are nothing. 
Whatever is a possibility of experience for me 
is so because it is already an actual reality for 
somebody. 

We must either admit something like this, or 
give up trying to verify any knowledge which 
we as individuals gain or possess. Suppose that 
I have an idea of an object. If this so-called 
"object" is not only outside and beyond my 
private mind, but also outside and beyond any 
mind in which I share, what proof can I ever 
get that the idea is like its " object"? 

And further, if the object is outside of mind, 
how can an idea, which is a mental affair, ever 
be like something which is, by supposition, not 
a mental affair? We have seen that so far as 
we do know anything we know it, not apart 
from, but in our consciousness; but whenever 
an idea of ours aims to correspond with some 
fact beyond, it always implies that we know 
enough about said fact to have vital relations 
with it. As we come to know it deeper we see 
that it verifies our first dim meaning about it; 
or it refuses to verify it, as is often the case. 

This is another instance like our search for a 
16 



242 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

lost word. Our fragmentary self of the moment 
knows enough about the word to go to the 
wider self, in whose keeping it is, to get it and 
it knows enough to verify it when it finds it. 
The name that is being sought is already a real 
mental fact somewhere within the zone of our 
own personal life, though in a deeper stratum 
than that in which we are now dwelling. The 
self that discovers the name includes both the 
seeking self and the finding self, and it knows 
that the thing found was the thing sought. 

So too every " object ' ' which we seek to know, 
if it is an object which has reality in the nature 
of things, is already a mental fact in the life of 
that larger Self in whom we share. We seek it 
because we partake of Him, and because there 
is inherent relationship between the self which 
seeks and the Self which possesses and verifies 
the thing sought. Every idea, as well as every 
ideal and every intimation of fmiteness points to 
an organic interrelation between our private, 
fragmentary personality and a Divine Person 
who manifests a bit of His life at our minute 
focus-point. 

Every fact of the personal life involves, as we 
have seen, a social relationship — a personal life 
is a fragment in a larger group. But we cannot 
stop at this group of finite selves. There could be 



The Self and the Over-Self 243 

no society without realities which are grounded 
in a consciousness which transcends the entire 
group of selves — this group is only a fragment. 
There are cosmic facts and possibilities, cosmic 
laws and prophecies which must already be 
known in a larger Life, or our present social life 
with its spiritual values and moral significance 
could not be. 

The person who would take an absolutely 
agnostic view and seriously question the reality 
of an infinite Companion must, if he plays fair, 
deny that anything is real beyond the momen- 
tary seemings of his private consciousness. 
Under such agnosticism science and morality 
must crumble as well as religion, and we are 
left with no distinction between waking and 
dreaming. It is all illusion and maya. 

Either there is no significance in this moment's 
experience, or it is an organic fact in the total 
whole of the cosmic consciousness. A God sitting 
aloof, in splendid isolation, would not help us 
out of this difficulty. He would be no explana- 
tion of our seekings and findings, He would in 
no way account for a world which in some 
strange way is bound up in a unity with our 
own lives — He would be forever an unknowable 
God. 

We could neither prove His existence nor be 



244 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

sure of any tidings which might purport to come 
from Him. Such a view severs the cosmos into 
two irrational halves. It gives us an unspiritual 
natural world on one side and an unknowable 
supernatural on the other side. The great gulf 
is fixed. 

The moment we come back to the adamantine 
fact of the unity of consciousness and realize 
that the reality of the world outside us and the 
significance of the life within us demand a deeper 
conscious Life in which ours is hid, our agnosti- 
cism must go. Unless we are prepared to be 
deniers through and through and to write 
" mene" on both the outer and the inner world, 
we must admit the reality of an infinite Self who 
is the Life of our lives and that every little inlet 
of human consciousness opens into the total 
whole of reality.* 

Cut up a magnet into pieces and each piece is 
as much a magnet as the whole was — the polarity 

* "We are rising to the conviction that we are a part of 
nature, and so a part of God; that the whole creation — the One 
and the Many and All-One — is travailing together toward some 
great end; and that now, after ages of development, we have 
at length become conscious portions of the great scheme, and 
can cooperate in it with knowledge and with joy. We are no 
aliens in a stranger universe governed by an outside God; we 
are parts of a developing whole, all enfolded in an embracing 
and interpenetrating love, of which we too, each to other, some- 
times experience the joy too deep for words." — Oliver Lodge, 
in the Hibbert Journal, April, 1904, p. 475. 



The Self and the Over-Self 245 

which was manifested in the whole is manifested 
in the minutest fragment. So, too, our slenderest 
idea, our restless seeking for the infinite, our 
feeblest pursuit after an ideal are mighty facts, 
for they show that the infinite is already present 
in the finite and we bear the marks — however 
dimly — of Him in whom we live : 

" One undivided soul of many a soul 
Whose nature is his own divine control 
Where all things flow to all as rivers to the sea." 



The Divine-Human Life 



"Lord, Thou art mine, and I am Thine, 
If mine I am; and Thine much more 
Than I or ought or can be mine. 
Yet to be Thine doth me restore, 
So that again I now am mine, 
And with advantage mine the more, 
Since this being mine brings with it Thine, 
And Thou with me dost Thee restore : 

If I without Thee would be mine, 

I neither should be mine nor Thine. 

"Lord, I am Thine, and Thou art mine ; 
So mine Thou art, that something more 
I may presume Thee mine than Thine 
For Thou didst suffer to restore 
Not Thee, but me, and to be mine: 
And with advantage mine the more, 
Since Thou in death wast none of Thine, 
Yet then as mine didst me restore : 

O, be mine still; still make me Thine; 

Or rather make no Thine and mine." 

George Herbert's "Clasping of Hands. 



The Divine-Human Life 

The preceding chapters have been dwelling 
upon the great fact of Divine and human inter- 
relationship — an interrelationship involved in 
the structure of personality, in the fibre of social 
life, in the reality of a world of law and order. 
Those who have patiently read this far will have 
saved up many questions which press for an 
answer, and they will now have a goodly crop 
of practical difficulties which they will wish to 
have met. 

It is easy to assume that all thoughtful 
readers will raise at least two questions: (i) 
"How does this interpretation of life explain 
sin?" (2) "What need is there for a gospel of 
redemption such as our New Testament fur- 
nishes ? ' ' 

(1) It " explains ' ' sin in the old-fashioned way. 
An unknown writer of the fourteenth century 
says : " Sin is nought else, but that the creature 
turneth away from the unchangeable Good . . . 

249 



250 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

that is to say, it turneth away from the Perfect 
to 'that which is in part,' and imperfect, and 
most often to itself"* We have assumed 
throughout that a person has power over his 
own act. He is a unique self. His life-course is 
not ruled from without, " as the wheel rules the 
spoke ; as the storm rules the rain-drop ; as the 
tide rules the wavelet." The entire process of 
the personal life involves choice, preference, will- 
attitudes. 

The soul's destiny is not in the stars; it is not 
anywhere outside. It is in the individual soul 
itself. The conjunct life of which we have talked 
much is no net of fate, no solid, rigid, causal 
bond. Its laws are moral laws, i. e., the law of 
liberty. 

These deepest relationships are like those of 
the family, where the child is made good by 
appeal and influence, not by hard compulsion. 
This earthly span is just our chance at the prize 
of becoming persons by drawing upon the spir- 
itual resources of the universe. To turn away 
from spiritual goals, to prefer the narrow, private 
"I," "me" and "mine" to the Unchangeable 
Good, to seek to "keep" the "isolated self" is 
to lose the "prize." So far as this is done 
knowingly and of choice, it is sin — it is an act 

* " Theologia Gernianica," p. 6. 



The Divine-Human Life 251 

which is aimed at the structure of society and at 
the entire Divine Order. 

But the wilful, warring soul does not fall out 
of the organic whole — that is impossible. If he 
make his bed in hell, lo! God is there. The 
sinner, so long as he is a sinner, is an exhibition 
of what is to be overcome before the spiritual 
universe can be a harmony. He is a vessel of 
dishonor, as the saint is a vessel of honor — one 
shows the triumph of the Divine Spirit in a 
personal life, the other illustrates the nature of 
holiness by showing the spiritual warfare going 
on at a friction-point where the harmony is 
disturbed.* 

Both saint and sinner are in God's world. One 
knows that it is God's world, and he is glad to 
be in it and of it and to make his life contribute 
to it. The other treats the Divine World as 
mere machinery for his individual ends and 
undertakes to set up a tiny "part" as though 
it were an independent god. 

Sin, then, springs out of freedom, and is an 
act of choice which tends to defeat the Divine 
movement toward holiness — but which really 
takes its place in the spiritual universe as a 

* " How the ' grit ' got into the cosmic organism may be a 
hard question; perhaps it has never yet been out. We could 
not have become what we are, without it." — Oliver Lodge, 
in Hibbert Journal, for April, 1904, p. 472. 



252 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

thing to be put down and triumphed over, much 
as the evil impulse has a place in the moral 
struggle of the good man who conquers it, and 
so gains a new degree of goodness.* 

(2) The same need exists for a gospel of 
redemption as appears in any conception of life 
or of God. 

The soul is free — free to live unto God, or 
to live unto "self." It cannot be pushed 
into goodness — it cannot be made good from 
without. 

Personality is made through ideals that are 
seen and loved and by the compelling power of 
personal life and personal influence. It must be 
wrought by something in front — by a drawing. 
Whatever may be latent or potential in the 
unconscious innocence of childhood, or however 
impossible it may be for any living soul to 
migrate absolutely from home and the Divine 
country, nobody is actually a son of God who 

* Wolfram von Eschenbach, in his " Parzival," has well told 
how life is forever a choice between good and evil: 

' ' Whose soul takes Untruth for its bride 
And sets himself on Evil's side, 
Chooses the Black, and sure it is 
His path leads down to the abyss; 
But he who doth his nature feed 
With steadfastness and loyal deed 
Lies open to the heavenly light 
And takes his portion with the White." 



The Divine-Human Life 253 

has not chosen to be, and who is not consciously 
facing homeward and Godward. 

With what awe the parent watches the momen- 
tous change from the period when his child lies 
before him the passive recipient of his tender 
care and love to the period when that same child 
calls him father and appreciates his love by filial 
response! * 

The Gospel is the story of the Father winning 
men to sonship. Jesus Christ is the supreme 
channel in human history for the personal com- 
munication of God — the revelation of the Divine 
and the human, united in one personality. 

By Him God came to humanity and through 
Him was expressed the Type toward which 
personal life should move and in Him was 
exhibited the eternal patience and sacrifice and 
love of God. " The peculiar greatness of Christ," 
as Harnack has said, "is that he has led men to 
God, so that they now live their own life with 
Him." 

Yes, He has led or drawn men, but He has 
done it by unveiling God to us and by showing us 
the Father, not as a Sovereign, not as a stern 
Judge — but as Infinite Lover who yearns over 

* " As a sculptor is said to have exclaimed indignantly on 
seeing a rude block of marble, ' What a godlike beauty thou 
hidest! ' thus God looks upon man in whom God's own image 
is hidden." — John Tauler, "Sermons." 



2 54 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

us and who suffers through our sin and blindness. 
The goal which the Gospel presents is the 
attainment of no far-away heaven — not admis- 
sion at the gate of some jeweled city in the sky. 
It is the reproduction of this Type of the Divine- 
human life which Christ manifested. 

The central idea of Christianity is the union 
of the two natures. Its history begins with a 
manifestation of such a realized union, the 
human element spiritualized, dominated, con- 
trolled by the Divine, and the Divine permeating 
and showing itself through the human — one 
single Life, to be the light of the world and pro- 
phetic of a new humanity. 

The two greatest interpreters of Christianity 
appeared while the memory of the historical 
facts were still fresh. They are St. Paul and 
St. John.* They have made this Divine-human 
relationship a central feature of their interpre- 
tations. For them both, religion is a Divine- 
human life — to be spiritual is to partake of the 
Divine Life. I shall begin with Paul, as his 
interpretation of Christianity is the earlier — in 
fact, the earliest which we possess. His great 
autobiographical passages point to a personal 
experience in which the Divine and the human 

* In the following pages I have made use of some material 
which appeared in four articles by me in " Present Day 
Papers," 1902. 



The Divine-Human Life 255 

are united, so that the possessor of it is " joined 
to the Lord in one spirit" (I Cor. vi. 17). 

The earliest of these passages is the one in 
Galatians in which he describes his new life: 
"It pleased God to reveal His Son in me" 
(i. 15, 16), and the inward life reaches such a 
degree of union that he finally cries out: "It is 
no longer I that live, but Christ * liveth in me: 
and that life which I now live in the flesh [i. e. y 
humanly] I live in faith, the faith which is in 
the Son of God" (ii. 20). f 

This epistle closes with some words which are 
open doubtless to various interpretations, but 
which are best understood in the vital, or 
mystical sense: " I bear in my body the marks 
of the Lord Jesus" (vi. 17). 

This means more than bodily "scars," won in 
"the good fight of the faith." It means a new- 
natured self, formed within, a new creation so 
deeply wrought, that even the body bears its 
marks and is the organ of the new, Christ-formed 
self. 

There is a large group of passages, scattered 
throughout the epistles, which make spiritual 
life consist in a central oneness of the human 

* Christ, for Paul, means the Divine Nature as revealed in 
Christ. 

f We shall see later that " faith," in the Pauline sense, is a 
Divine-human energy. 



2 56 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

with the Divine : " The mystery (or as we should 
say, the essential fact) of the Gospel, is Christ in 
you" (Col. i. 27). " Your life [if you are saints] 
is hid with Christ in God" (Col. iii. 3). "If Christ 
is in you, the spirit is life" (Rom. viii. 10). 

The profound prayer in Ephesians asks that 
" Christ may dwell in your hearts, " that " ye may 
be filled to all fulness with God" (Eph. iii. 17, 19). 

In all these passages, salvation is not only the 
product of the resident Divine Life — it is the 
resident Divine Life in a human life. There is 
everywhere a beautiful confusion of contained 
and container. We are evidently not in the 
realm where terms of space have any meaning. 
One moment we hear of Christ in the believer 
and the next the believer is in Christ; now we 
are to walk in the Spirit, and again the Spirit is 
to dwell in us. It is all the same. 

The truth is that the twain form a united 
whole : 

" So they loved, as love in twain 
Had the essence but in one; 
Two distincts, division none: 
Number there in love was stain." 

There is another confusion which easily van- 
ishes. At one stage Paul can say, "Christ lives 
in me," and at a later stage he is bending all 
his energies to "apprehend Christ;" in one 
passage he is rejoicing that " God has revealed 



The Divine-Human Life 257 

His Son in him," and then again he announces 
that his one aim is to "win Christ," to "know 
Him" (see Phil. iii. 8, 10). 

As soon as religion is seen to be the impene- 
tration of the human life with God or a partici- 
pation of the human in the Divine, then of 
course no single experience exhausts it, no finite 
attainment can bring one to the terminus. 

Every revelation reveals also a "more yet;" 
every "apprehension" discloses a farther goal 
to be won; every possession carries with it a 
vision of new riches to be gained. 

This infinite aspect of the spiritual life, which 
holds such a place in Paul's writings, is bound 
up with this great fact of Divine-human inter- 
relation. The two lives open into each other, as 
one's narrow casement opens into the sun. The 
process sweeps on until this man can say: " For 
me to live is Christ" (Phil. i. 21). 

A study of Paul's use of "faith" will show 
that this Divine-human idea permeated his 
entire conception of salvation in all its stages. 
The significance which he gives this word was 
not learned in the rabbinical school, it was not 
absorbed from the intellectual atmosphere of the 
period ; it had its birth rather in his own personal 
experience.* 

*See Mean's ' St. Paul and the Ante-N%cene Church" p. 55. 
i7 



258 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

Faith is the inward activity of the entire self 
in response to the attraction of Christ. The 
Divine Nature reaching out and giving Himself 
is the energy of Grace. The soul's assent and 
joy, the heart's confidence and trust, the will's 
appropriation and apprehension of this Divine 
communication as one complete activity is the 
energy of faith. 

They are the centrifugal and the centripetal 
forces of salvation. "If any man be in Christ 
he is a new creation" (II Cor. v. 17). That is 
Paul's way of telling what salvation is. The 
human part toward the accomplishment of this 
great end is faith, and that is presented as a 
continual dying unto self and a living unto God. 
" I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no 
longer I that live ; yet Christ liveth in me, and 
the life I now live in the flesh I live in faith, 
the faith which is in the Son of God " (Gal. ii. 20). 

This energy of faith as appropriation of the 
Divine Life is often expressed by the words, 
"Put on Christ;" it is, again, the spiritual 
activity of "winning Christ," or of "walking in 
the Spirit" or of "working out salvation," for 
God is working within toward the same end. 
Everywhere faith is thought of as cooperation 
with an inworking God. It involves a co-dying 
with Christ, a co-rising with Him, a re-living of 



The Divine-Human Life 259 

the Divine Life. Paul's sacramental passages all 
go down into a vital, mystical meaning. They 
imply faith-acts which win actual union in the 
Divine Life (see Rom. vi. 3-8; Gal. iii. 27 ; I Cor. 
x. 16 seq). 

Faith is thus an actual energy by which a 
new self — Christ's life — is substituted for the 
old, sinful, isolated self; it is the activity by 
which the riches of Grace — the life of privilege — 
is appropriated and made an actual experience. 

Paul has a still deeper word by which to 
express this response of the heart, this appropria- 
tion of the Divine Life. That word is Love. It 
is impossible to separate faith and love. They 
are not two describable activities. They are 
rather different stages of one activity. "Faith 
worketh through love;" "it is with the heart 
\i. e., lovewise] man believeth; 11 "'it is love that 
believeth all things." 

Faith calls for more of a knowledge-basis than 
love does. In the faith stage there is still 
remaining the contrast of subject and object — 
of mine and thine. Love reaches below this 
contrast. It witnesses to a union of life. It 
proves in the last analysis to be the power 
working underneath every spiritual transforma- 
tion. Paul set himself to re-live the Christ-life 
by faith because he discovered that the Son of 



260 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

God loved him and gave Himself for him (Gal. 
ii. 20). "He died for all" and that is why we 
are constrained to die unto self and to live unto 
Him (see II Cor. v. 15). 

We conquer through Him that loved us (Rom. 
viii. 37). Divine Love is the power unto salva- 
tion and human love is the fruit and evidence 
of life in God. The first fruit of the Spirit is 
love. It is the supreme miracle of the new 
order. Tongues, prophecies, healings, wonder- 
working, are all of lower grade. It is the way 
to truth — " Being rooted and grounded in love, 
ye maybe able to comprehend" (Eph. iii. 17-18), 
and it is the new ethical principle — Love is the 
fulfilling of the law (Rom. xiii. 10). 

It is the gulf -stream which indicates our union 
with the inexhaustible Source. This brings us 
to Paul's conception of the Holy Spirit, for here 
at last is the primal river which has been flooding 
every stream which we have tried to explore. 

The message to the Athenians tells it all in a 
sentence: " We live in God" (see Acts xvii. 28). 
The "new creation" is life in the Spirit, so that 
"all things are of God." The diapason of the 
working of the Spirit in the believer beats 
through the entire eighth chapter of Romans. 
It witnesses back to the heart of the believer 
that he is a son of God and it enables him 



The Divine-Human Life 261 

to read a divine event in the whole creation- 
process — the unveiling of sons of God. The 
divine image is wrought out in progressive glory 
by the Spirit of the Lord, and this inward life 
transforms a man into "a letter of Christ," i. e., 
a personal expression of Him (see II Cor. iii. 
3 and 18). 

The Holy Spirit is the self -communication of 
God, manifested in persons and producing a 
Divine-human life, which demonstrates itself. 
(This self-demonstration of the Spirit is set forth 
in I Cor. ii.) 

This idea gets its highest expression in two 
great figures — the person as a temple and the 
person as a member of an organic body. In the 
first place the individual may become a Temple 
of the Holy Spirit — a revealing place for God. 
This insight is a source of Paul's marvelous 
optimism. Sin may abound, the flesh may be 
weak, the old habits of paganism may be deeply 
fixed, but God can inhabit men, win them, dwell 
in them, join them to Himself in one Spirit. 

But if the Temple-idea is true, it is capable 
of imperial expansion. If many men are thus 
joined to the Lord in one spirit, they will be 
organic with each other, and instead of many 
individual Temples there will appear a kingdom 
of Temples. Just this Paul sees. 



262 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

All these individual spiritual buildings fitly 
framed together grow into a holy Temple in 
the Lord for a habitation of God through the 
Spirit (Eph. ii. 21, 22). (Note again the con- 
fusion of contained and container. The Temple 
is in the Lord and God makes His habitation in 
the Temple.) The idea is unspeakably sublime — 
a Temple of Temples! 

Did Paul consider flesh, body, as inherently 
vile and unredeemable? Did he hold to a rigid 
dualism of body and spirit? If he did, he forgot 
it here. The God who showed Himself in the 
face of Jesus Christ can also find a Temple — a 
revealing place, in any transformed human life. 

But the Temple figure is more or less imperfect. 
It expresses the fact that God and man can come 
together in one life, but the figure is strained as 
soon as it tries to express the organic idea. 

It is not easy to think of a Temple as living, 
as growing. Paul easily goes over to the body- 
figure. Instead of a living temple in an Arch- 
Temple we have organic members in one body. 
"Ye are (collectively) the body of Christ, and 
each one of you a particular member of it" 
(I Cor. xii. 27). The whole purpose of Christian 
activity and the end of all ministering is "the 
building up of the body of Christ," that all 
believers together "may grow up in all things 



The Divine-Human Life 263 

into Him who is the Head, even Christ; from 
whom all the body fitly knit together, through 
that which every joint supplieth, according to 
the working in due measure of each several part, 
maketh increase of the body unto the building 
up of itself in love" (Eph. iv. 11-16). 

There is no true " perfecting of saints" which 
does not also at the same time build up the 
body of Christ, and there is no increase of the 
body which does not show itself in the increase 
of the stature of some person who is coming up 
into a full-grown man. So organic is the spir- 
itual life. Humanity in Paul's thought is to 
become a kingdom of God, but with no remote 
king who imposes laws and commands obedience. 
It is rather a spiritualized humanity, a new 
social order, a re-creation, a kingdom not in 
word, but in life and power, a divine society with 
the living God as the inward law and spirit of it, 
realizing His purpose through human organs. 

This was the vision of the man who wrote the 
earliest parts of our New Testament. His vision 
of a new humanity rested on the fact of his own 
new creation. The Son of God was revealed in 
him, and what was true for him might be true 
for anybody. The heart of the gospel of Paul is 
the good news that God is realizing His presence 
in the life of man. It presents a Divine-human 



264 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

life completely realized in one Person and 
potential for all persons. 

It would not be at all difficult to show that 
this idea of a Divine-human interrelationship is 
clearly present in all the synoptic gospels. The 
pure in heart see God, those who hunger for 
Him find Him. He is far away and hard to 
find only for those who lack the spiritual qualities 
of life through which He can show Himself. 

Even here the kingdom of God is proclaimed 
as within * — it comes as fast as any man does 
God's will. The spiritual goal here is to be 
"perfect like the heavenly Father." Any one 
who does God's will is a brother or a sister of 
the Lord Christ and so is in the holy family. 

In no other words has the solidarity of God 
and humanity been so divinely voiced as in that 
judgment scene, where it is announced: "Inas- 
much as ye have done anything unto one of 
these my brethren, even the least, ye have done 
it unto me" (Maft. xxv. 40). 

The most striking contrast which is drawn 
between men is the contrast between those who 
are rich in houses and barns and those who are 
rich in God (Luke xii. 16-21). 

* There is a most significant " saying" of Jesus among the 
fragments of Logia recently found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt: 
" Verily the kingdom of heaven is within you, and whoever 
knoweth himself shall find it." 



The Divine-Human Life 265 

But the writings of John * give us the fullest 
expression of the Divine-human life which has 
ever been given, outside of Paul's letters. 

John uses three sacred words — all of which 
mean the same thing — to express the new life 
which through Christ has become possible for 
man — " to be of God," " born of God," " begotten 
of God." He is telling of a farther type of life — 
higher than mere human life as human life is 
higher than animal, or animal is higher than 
plant. It is a life which "has received" God 
by an act of response. 

From the nature of the case, spiritual life 
cannot be reached along the line of natural 
impulse — of least resistance. It cannot come 
without personal choice and conscious effort. 
Nobody could be pushed into the spiritual life 
by a force from behind. Even such a humble 
virtue as patience cannot be thrust upon a soul. 
The soul attains it by seeing an ideal standard 
and by rising to it through effort and discipline. 

So, too, this life "of God," this "begetting 
from above," is both received and won. God 
gives Himself freely, there is no withholding. 
He is Spirit. He is not "away" somewhere in 

* This is not the place to discuss the authorship of these 
writings. I assume that the Fourth Gospel and the First 
Epistle are from the same hand, and I shall call the author 
John. 



2 66 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

the inaccessible heights. " He is never so far off 
as to be near." " He is Love," which is another 
way of saying that it is fundamental to His 
nature to go out of Himself, to give and share 
Himself. 

Yes, but He cannot mechanically pour Himself 
into another spirit, any more than we can pour 
truth from one mind into another mind. Truth 
is free — but only for those who come with stren- 
uous purpose to win it. The lazy, sluggish soul 
is "heir of all the ages." All that the wise men 
have learned lies ready for him to receive. But 
the poor fellow will die as ignorant as a cave- 
dweller unless he gets some day an insight into 
its worth and then sets himself to the task of 
making this free truth his own. 

Spiritual "births" are, thus, Divine-human 
processes. The love and life are free, but they 
drop into no passive soul. They must be seen and 
appropriated. They could no more come by nat- 
ural birth than could Raphael's skill or Newton's 
knowledge. 

The human action, or to use John's own 
report, the human "work" which makes this 
birth possible is faith — an active, cooperating 
faith: " This is the work which God wants, that 
ye believe on Him whom God has sent ' ' (John 
vi. 28, 29). Whether the word "faith" is used, 



The Divine-Human Life 267 

or the expression, " believe on," it is always a 
continuous activity which is implied — a human 
cooperation with the Divine Life: " He that 
belie veth on me shall never hunger." " Whoso- 
ever belie veth in me hath eternal life. " " Whoso- 
ever belie veth is begotten of God " (I John v. 1). 
The spiritual state runs parallel with the human 
activity, named " faith," which is plainly the 
principle of the new life — no more a single, 
temporal act than the law of gravitation is. 

Faith is a closing of the circuit of personal 
relationship between man and God. It may 
begin on a low level — a man may begin to 
believe, "for the very works' sake," or because 
of the words that are spoken, but it advances 
steadily from the external to the internal, until 
it becomes its owi] evidence : "He that belie veth 
on the Son of God hath the witness in himself ' ■ 
(I John v. 10); "Faith is the victory" (I John 
v. 4). This results in a new "beatitude," 
" Blessed are they who have not seen, yet have 
believed" (John xx. 29; see also I John i. 1-3). 

Throughout the Johannine writings faith is a 
process of appropriating the Divine Life — it 
brings the believer "breast to breast with God." 
But there are also other expressions for the same 
operation. 

One of the most striking and deeply mystical 



268 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

expressions comes out in the Capernaum dis- 
course (John vi. 27-65): "You must eat me." 
Here again the "human taking" is set over 
against the "Divine giving." Eternal life is 
based on the assimilation of Christ's life. The 
multitudes flocked to Him because they thought 
He would feed them in miraculous fashion and 
relieve them of painful drudgery. He seizes 
their temporal hunger and the process of satis- 
fying it, as a great figure. The body assimilates 
bread and changes it over into vital energy. 
Precisely so He offers to give Himself — the 
Divine Life — to satisfy their deeper hunger and 
to supply spiritual energy. 

It was no new phrase. Even the Rabbis 
of the time spoke of "eating the years of the 
Messiah," where they meant partaking of the 
benefits of his reign. "Eating Him" and "be- 
lieving on Him" mean the same thing. In 
either case, it is partaking of Him, assimi- 
lating or appropriating Him and living by 
Him. 

Another word for this process of appropriation 
is "knowing Him." It is, in John, a vital, char- 
acter word rather than an intellectual term; he 
that doeth the truth gets the light; he that doeth 
the will knows the doctrine. 

One illustration will suffice to show that John 



The Divine-Human Life 269 

uses "knowing" as a process of appropriation, 
i. e., of partaking. "This is life eternal to 
be coming to know (yiyvcoorKcocn) thee" (John 
xvii. 3). This is plainly a life -experience, a 
method by which one "becomes of God." To 
have Him, to see Him, to know Him, to abide in 
Him, to believe on Him, to love Him are various 
aspects of one process which leads to eternal life. 

They are words of similar import, and John 
glories in his mystical circle: We shall be like 
Him because we see Him; we know Him 
because we abide in Him; we abide in Him 
because we love Him; we love Him because we 
are born of Him! 

All these spiritual processes are processes of 
winning the object sought and of possessing it 
as an inward life -gain. To be getting eternal 
life and to be getting God mean the same things : 
He that knows God has eternal life ; he that hath 
the Son hath eternal life. 

John also makes the same confusion of con- 
tained and container which we have seen in 
Paul. We pass back and forth from the 
expression, " Abide in God" and " God dwells in 
you : " He that loveth, abideth in God — He that 
loveth, God dwelleth in Him. It is another 
glorious mystical circle. The inlet is in the 
Ocean, and the Ocean is in the inlet! 



270 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

Finally, as with Paul, so here, we find ourselves 
carried over into an organic life. The Vine- 
passage (John xv. 1 -10) is the best illustration 
of it. The passage tells of a vital Divine -human 
relationship, not through loss of individuality, 
and by " fusing all the skirts of self," but by 
entering consciously into a Life in which "the 
margin fades forever and forever as we move." 

The branch is a branch because it is in the 
vine; the vine is a vine because it has branches. 
The same sap is in them all. Their life is a 
shared life, a common life. Branch and vine are 
organic to each other. Both life and spiritual 
fruit are conditioned upon vital union and par- 
ticipation. It is a life of giving and receiving. 

The doctrine of the Paraclete goes on farther 
with this idea of the spiritual, organic life. We 
are brought to the fact of an indwelling, ever- 
expanding Divine Life, or Spirit of Truth, 
operative through persons, teaching, guiding, 
anointing, illuminating, convicting of sin, con- 
victing of righteousness and showing Himself as 
a "divine seed" within (see I John iii. 9). He 
is the ever-abiding, immanent God, producing a 
society of those who know Him, because He 
dwelleth with them and is in them, who love 
Him because they are of Him and who manifest 
Him because they are begotten of Him — "born 



The Divine-Human Life 271 

not of flesh, or of the will of man, but of 
God." 

The highest word about this Divine-human 
society, this organic, interrelated life is reached 
in Christ's prayer (John xvii.) Prayer itself is 
in the Johannine view the sign and mark of a 
union with God — "the words that I speak, I 
speak not of myself" (John xiv. 10; see also 
John xv. 7, 16 and I John v. 14). The sacred 
refrain of the great prayer, to which allusion is 
made, is " that they all may be made one." 

Christ's own oneness with God is to be the 
standard, the goal — "one, even as we are one." 
We have here travelled beyond the " mine and 
the thine," beyond all getting and keeping for 
the isolated self — " all mine are thine and thine 
are mine." 

"Love is only 
Perfect when itself transcends 
Itself, and one with what it loves 
In undivided being blends." 

There is no limit to the interflow between 
God who is love and him who has learned to 
love as Christ loved. The only terminus hinted 
is that divine event toward which moves the 
whole revelation through Christ — " I in them, 
thou in me that they be made perfect in one." 

Dante, at the summit of his celestial journey, 
sees the saints of all ages as the petals of a 



272 Social Law in the Spiritual World 

mighty rose, forming one consummate flower 
with God Himself for centre. No figure could 
better suggest the truth of this cooperative, 
organic spiritual life. It is a union of differ- 
entiated selves and a differentiation in realized 
unity. God living through men and men living 
in God. 

" There is a light above, which visible 
Makes the Creator unto every creature, 
Who only in beholding Him has peace, 
And it expands itself in circular form 
To such extent, that its circumference 
Would be too large a girdle for the sun. 
Mirrored I saw in more ranks than a thousand 
All who above there have from us returned. 
And if the lowest row collect within it 
So great a light, how vast the amplitude 
Is of this Rose in its extremest leaves !" 

" Paradiso," Canto XXX. 




NOV 3 1904 



